Tuesday, July 29, 2014

photo series ~ 05/13/14-07/29/14 ~ Pinnacles National Park - west

Eriodictyon tomentosum, Castilleja foliolosa, Eriogonum fasciculatum var. foliolosum
Boraginaceae, Orobanchaceae, Polygonaceae
May 13, 2014 to July 29, 2014

Can you see the rhythm of nature's clock?  Look how the paintbrush trades its colors with the CA buckwheat.  I started taking these pictures on a whim and have been pleasantly impressed by the sly seasonal color changes at Pinnacles.  When I parsed these 12 weekly photos into 2 sets every other week, it becomes apparent that the rate of change is not a constant.  Fascinating.

ps 09/10/14 - I changed the var. of CA buckwheat from polifolium to what I believe is the greener, more common one along the road.

7 comments:

Imperfect and Tense said...

Fantastic idea, well-executed, great result.

Amazing stuff!

Katie (Nature ID) said...

Thanks. I'm considering doing something like this on a more formal basis next year, with maybe fixed cameras or marked spots. As this was, I didn't even get out of the car to take the photos because I had no idea what would happen.

randomtruth said...

Nicely done. You probably thought of this, but if you do it again it would be interesting to record/collect temperature info for the period. I'd guess the variation in rate of change is often tied to heat spells.

Any idea which plant(s) the Castilleja is parasitizing?

Katie (Nature ID) said...

Oop, I lied about the weather stuff - will delete. I forgot about the early hot temps in April.

I searched online for reported host plants and only found reference on Las Pilitas Nursery. C. foliolosa is semi-parasitic and also reportedly uses chamise, woolly blue curls, and artemesia. There is chamise nearby, but maybe not close enough? It could be growing on its own, but I suspect the CA buckwheat is its host. The related C. subinclusa is reported to use CA buckwheat. I don't think this Castilleja is subinclusa.

Neil said...

I love this series, and the west entrance series that appeared in my RSS feed. I was going to leave a comment on that post about stabilization but it appears to be gone now.

I have done some GIF stabilization with ImageJ (freeware) and a free plugin here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kangli/code/Image_Stabilizer.html

It seemed intimidating at first, but it was actually pretty easy. ImageJ is a great tool for lots of simple tasks with photos (e.g. measuring linear distances or areas).

You can also use the free panorama program Hugin, a little more labor intensive I think.

http://imgur.com/a/3qfWQ

Katie (Nature ID) said...

Awesome, Neil. I'll play around with your suggestions this week. Maybe I'll post the west entrance again with the stabilization.

Jennifer said...

This is awesome!!!