Only The Wind Knows

Homewood Cemetery, August 2009. View through an incinerator.

The Potatoes
Near the beginning my sophomore year, I naively purchased two potatoes with the intention of cooking and eating them. Instead, the potatoes languished on my bookshelf for nearly two semesters, wrapped in a plastic bag and untouched.

The second time I ever looked at them was when I was cleaning out my room and preparing to leave Pittsburgh for the summer. Taking them out, I noticed that the bag was shaped a bit strangely, and I soon found out why.

I knew potatoes grew sprouts if left alone for a while, but I had no idea they could become so unearthly and tentacular. They had clearly sucked the life out of the potatoes, which had become shrunken and shriveled. It looked like the potatoes needed an exorcism. I resisted the urge to fling the bag away.

The sprouts did look pretty awesome though. Nature had impressed me.

The Onion
This year, I bought an onion, wrapped it in a bag, and put it in the refrigerator in the misguided hope of making stir-fry at some point. So you can guess what happened when I took it out several months later.

Despite my experience with the potatoes, this one caught me by surprise. I had no idea onions could sprout so much stuff, in the fridge no less. Compared to the potatoes, the onion’s growths were quite pleasant and green and fresh-looking. And reminded me of Cthulhu.

I was so fond of the onion that I decided to bury it in a secluded corner of a field nearby. I wasn’t sure that’s how onions work, but I thought it was worth a try. I dug a small hole and dropped it in.

When I went back to check on it after a few days, the onion was gone. I suppose it looked too delicious and got hefted off by some woodland creature. Ah well; it will be remembered.

Growth: Full album

Playing with the convex mirror on Wean 4th floor. Taken April 17, 2009.

More psychedelic version:

Aside from the levels, I didn’t touch anything else; the sky really did look like that. A feast of colors. Taken March 28, 2009.

CMU Football Field, Spring 2008.
Wider version (no filter)

Wean Hall stairwell. February 3rd, 2009.

I was immediately struck by the antiquated look of this alarm in a hidden corner of Hunt Library. It was tricky to shoot because there was nothing to prop the camera on, so it was completely handheld with a 1/8 second shutter. Taken March 5th, 2009.

East Point, Prince Edward Island, Summer 2008.

You get to see about 300 degrees of ocean on this lick of peninsula, with cliffs all around. Give me a place with some rocky cliffs and I’m a happy guy.

I took 11 photos, and the panoramic image is the result of merging 8 of them using Photoshop’s Automate -> Photomerge. The image size was 13722 x 2104 (the version here is reduced for sanity) and the PSD file was 182 MB. I’m impressed that so much detail can be retained in a 621 KB jpeg.

A closer look at part of the image:

[Addendum: 3/14/09]
Photoshop and Canon PhotoStitch both choke when I try to merge all 11 photos together, and I can’t blame them. Some of the last few images are purely sea and sky, with nothing in the way of reference points; the waves change too quickly.

But after seeing a good word about Autopano Pro from Gigapan (which has awesome panoramas on display), I gave it another shot.

I was very impressed with the result.

The downside is that the trial version of Autopano creates a watermark on the image. But it’s still nice to see the panorama as it was envisioned.

We went deep sea fishing during our Canada trip.

Apparently on such trips, if someone happens to catch a tuna, the boat turns around and heads back to shore immediately. Everyone’s money is refunded and they rush to mail the tuna to Japan where it fetches high prices and is prized as sushi for Japanese businessmen.

About 20 minutes away from the coast of Prince Edward Island, our boat stopped so we could start fishing. We were taught to drop our weighted fishing rods over the side and let the weight drop for 5 seconds before locking it in place. Soon after we were prepped, a school of mackerel arrived on the scene.

For the next fifteen minutes, everyone on the boat would catch two fish almost as soon as their fishing rods hit water. We didn’t even need to use bait. It was quite a heady experience; everyone must’ve caught at least ten mackerel each. This were a lot of fun, though the fish itself wasn’t worth much.

Our next stop was in pursuit of cod, which is supposed to be more valuable. While we traveled, flocks of around twenty seagulls would follow the boat, gliding just a few feet from us, waiting for scraps of fish to be thrown to them. Cod was harder to catch: not everyone snagged one (e.g. me), and after a while we were getting no bites at all. We moved to three other locations with little luck. Somewhat anticlimactically, the most exciting part of the trip was the first school of mackerel.

The deep sea fishing took us the early part of an afternoon. Afterward, we drove along the coast to East Point, which is a great peninsular vantage point on a corner of Prince Edward Island. The photos are here:

Gallery East Point