Month: April 2014

Tulips at the Trenton Farmers Market

The Trenton Farmers Market is just across the street from the movie-theatre-converted-to-office-building where I work.

The Trenton Farmers Market is just across the street from the movie-theatre-converted-to-office-building where I work. On Friday, it's become customary for me to go over to the market for lunch at Button's Creperie. Sometimes I pickup up a bottle of wine from Unionville Vineyard or Terhune Orchards. Almost always I will get a bag or two of apple cider doughnuts from the friendly young woman at Terhune Orchards.

This Thursday the kids were off for spring break. Bhavna thought it would be great for them to see where I work. We planned to meet at the Trenton Farmers Market for lunch. Shaan and Kiran had chicken fingers and fries from King Foods in the food court. Bhavana and I had a crepe from Button's. I had the peanut butter, granola and banana crepe. Delicious.

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After lunch we walked around the market. The kids bought some gummy candies from The Amish Country Store. Bhavna and I looked at the flowers and herbs.

Cherry blossom macro portraits with olloclip and a makeshift desktop studio

Around the last year of graduate school, I came down with the "sniffles". For weeks I had itchy, watery eyes, a stuffy nose, and I sneezed almost incessantly. It impacted my school work, and my friend insisted I take a trip to the school's medical centre. I was shocked, too, when she told me that I had seasonal allergies. I grew up in the British West Indies. I never heard of anyone who had allergies to anything.

Every I get the sneezing, nasal itch and drooling, itchy eye-watering, "sniffly" allergies. I love the Spring but hate my bodies reaction to it. That doesn't stop me from doing what I love—walking outdoors, enjoying nature coming to life after many months of dreary grey. Of course, I pay for it later.

The building grounds crew were clipping off low hanging branches from the trees right outside the entrance. I asked, and they cut off a small bunch for me to take.

By: Khürt Williams - CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I set up a small "desktop studio" using two sheets of 11x14" paper. One layer was laid flat on the desk, and the other was set against the cubicle's wall. The branch was placed on the paper and illuminated directly above the fluorescent light installed at the desk.

I had a lot of trouble securing the iPhone. I wanted to make sure focusing was as sharp as possible. This was challenging given the shallow depth of field of the macro lenses. I didn't have a tripod, so I improvised. I stuck a bent business card into the slot in my Kenu car iPhone holder. After a great deal of trial and error, I was able to get the setup stabilised. I used the digital zoom feature of Camera+ to check that my focus was as sharp as possible. To be sure, I used the 5-second shutter timer on Camera+ to reduce any potential camera shake when I tapped the on-screen shutter release.

By: Khürt Williams - CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The following set of images were taken with the Olloclip 10X and 15X macro lens attachments for the iPhone 5. The images were exported to the iOS camera roll1 and then imported into Photogene to remove a scratch on my iPhone lens2. Once the scratch was removed, the images were exported to Flickr. This was to ensure I had a backup of the images before moving on. I then did another export to the iOS camera roll and imported images into Mextures.

By: Khürt Williams - CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In Mextures, I applied some of the formulas from the Summer Formula's pack to create the final result. What do you think of the results?

  1. I realised later that I could have exported the images directly from Camera+ to Photogene. ↩
  2. The scratch shows up as a purple dot in every photo. Quite annoying but easy to remove with the "Heal" tool in Photogene. ↩

Rojo's Roastery Papua New Guinea kimel estate AA

Rojo's Roastery Papua New Guinea kimel estate AA. wet process var: mondo novo, blue mountain, typical, arusha, caturra, catimor

I've drunk a lot of coffee from Rojo's Roastery lately. Since I now work in the Trenton area, my commute is a little longer, I leave home a little sooner. Driving over to Rojo's Palmer Square shop is on the way so I've stopped in when I run out of coffee. Right now that seems to be the middle of the week usually on Wednesday or Thursday.

But I'll have to take some time to visit Buy the Cup this weekend. Vitali probably misses me.