Wordless Wednesday

A White One

A couple of weeks or so ago I bought four new Lithops (Living Stones). They are all mature plants and one has flowered for me. Of the first batch all those which flowered were yellow so I was really pleased to see at least one of the new ones has a white flower:







The flower first showed, closed, several days ago and with such dull weather conditions I began to wonder whether it would ever open. Then on Friday we had a glorious Sunny afternoon and, like the others, it opened after being in Sunlight for a few hours and soon after the Sun had moved past.

To give an idea of size, they are all in 2 inch (50mm) pots.

Monday Mystery - Guess What

Congratulations and a virtual Midmarsh Gold Star to Adrian, Wilma and Ragged Robin who worked out correctly that last week's mystery photo was a frog:

  

Thank you to all who are brave enough to have a go.

Now for the new mystery.
I hope it's not too blooming difficult.
Guess what:


Please leave any guesses in the comments.
They will be revealed, along with the answer, next Monday.
No prizes, just for fun.

Sunrise

Autumn can be a great time to see colourful Sunrises and this morning was no exception:





We were out walkabout at 7 a.m. this morning. I hadn't taken a camera with me so those shots were taken with the iPhone4 looking across the village school playing field. It's a pity such sights are so short lived but that helps to make them even more special.

Froggy Encounter

One night recently I encountered one of the garden frogs and decided to compare the lighting with the Nikon built in flash and one of the miniature LED flood lights. All the photos are cropped and auto enhanced in iPhoto, mainly for exposure:

Taken with the Nikon's own flash:



Taken with the mini LED flood:



As you can see the flood light illumination is on the orange / yellow side. Something I had noticed with the photo of the pupa I took a few days ago. This is not really surprising as the flood has 16 LEDs, 8 appear to be brilliant white and 8 what is often called warm white:



Not a real problem as a tweak of the temperature and tint settings in iPhoto pretty well brings things back to normal. This one started out like the last but has been 'adjusted':

 

Friday at the Flicks - Waterfall Bathers

I managed to sneak the camera and tripod just outside the back door, about fifty feet away from the waterfall. The birds hardly noticed me behind the tripod. Mainly House Sparrows with Starlings soaking everything in sight and a fleeting visit from a juvenile Collared Dove:



It was unfortunate I had to change the soundtrack. For some reason the natural sound recorded at the time has a lot of background noise.

Soundtrack:  Eternity by Positively Dark
A free download from:  http://www.entropymusic.com/

Have a great weekend observing the wildlife around you.

Autumn - The Fall

 

There are far more evergreens than deciduous trees around my part of the village but I did spot a couple of signs as to why Autumn can also be known as Fall:



This is one of the village Horse Chestnut trees ....



where it's not just leaves falling ......





but also the seeds (conkers):



We were lucky one day when about half a dozen conkers all fell at the same time. Fortunately on the road and not on the path where we were walking as they really hit the road at quite a speed.