Thanx...

[puretube]

Hi Walters:

thank you for taking your time putting me through the test individually  

let me make up for that with this nice little spring-impression pic for you:

[maximee]

you don't wanna know what that flower reminds me of....  :shock:

[Mark Hammer]

Ton, those flower pics are always amazing.

What kind of resolution camera and lens are you using?  I doubt any of us could get anything quite so strikingly detailed and close up with the standard $250 digicam.

[puretube]

it`s a cam that I worked 5 years for, bought last year, after I saw it`s predecessor in the hands of Fran (-tone), and she let me play with it 6 years back in NYC when she was still working @ E-H...

(it`s a S*ny - the big one)

[puretube]

you don't wanna know what that flower reminds me of....  :shock:

a toothless lion-mouth?

(it`s a DSC-F828 cam, set to 5M pixels;
Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar 2 - 2,8 / 7,1 - 51);

[walters]

1.) well ok thanks puretone u seem like a nice person

[Marcos - Munky]

you don't wanna know what that flower reminds me of....  :shock:

Well, if you are thinking the same thing that I'm thinking...

I don't like flowers too much. I like them, but not a lot. But Ton's pics are beautiful, with great quality.

[space_ryerson]

you don't wanna know what that flower reminds me of....  :shock:

Well, if you are thinking the same thing that I'm thinking...

probably the same thing Georgia O'Keefe was thinking...

[maximee]

a toothless lion-mouth?

not even close...

it's an "extreme close up" of "something". i get this sort of flashbacks on a regular basis since my time working in the hospital...  

but other that that: nice detailed pictures.

[puretube]

[Zero the hero]

Well, a different view for a flower.

[Mark Hammer]

It doesn't get much more off-topic than this, but about 6 years ago I attended an incredibly fascinating lecture by a researcher who was studying the relationship between flower colour and the evolution of vision in those animal species that interact with flowers.

You will note that violet is a shorter wavelength of light than yellow, and yellow is shorter than red.  The majority of *wild* plant species that flower are closer to the violet/short end of the spectrum than the red/long end.

In general, plant species whose blossoms are in the yellow to violet end of the spectrum, are fertilized/pollenated by insect species whose colour visual sensitivity peaks in that range of the spectrum.  In other words, those insects are relatively blind to colours closer to the red end of the visual spectrum, and unable to even notice red or orange flowers.  At a physical level, it makes sense in a way.  Smaller animals have tinier visual organs and the way light diffracts through them makes it difficult for them to detect longer wavelengths.

Plant species whose blossoms tend to be in the reddish end of the spectrum also tend to be pollenated by larger, more recently evolved insect species, and by birds, who are even more recently evolved.  It also happens that plants with reddish blossoms (which includes orange as well) give indications of having evolved more recently (in terms of geological time).  I may have remebered this wrong, but I think bees are more recently evolved than butterflies.  Given their social organization, though, (and the lack of one for butterflies), my sense is that I have remembered this right.

So what we have is an interesting shift over evolutionary time of the features of flowers that attract animals to help them reproduce, and the visual capacities of those animal species that pollenate them.  The two have marched hand in hand across evolution, with the birds and bees singing "I only have eyes for you".

neat, huh?