#LastontheCard

My Last Photo — May ‘24

Fandango10 Comments

Brian, aka Bushboy, posted his monthly Last on the Card prompt, where he asks us to…

  • Post the last photo from your camera’s SD card or the last photo from your phone taken in the month of May.
  • No editing — who cares if it is out of focus, not framed as you would like, or the subject matter didn’t cooperate?
  • No explanations needed — just the photo will do.
  • Create a pingback to Brian’s post or link in the comments.
  • Use the tags “The Last Photo” and #LastOnTheCard.”

I have two photos I took yesterday to share with you today. As a reminder, these photos, taken with my iPhone 15 Pro Max, have been resized (shrunk) to make them load more quickly and take up less space in my WordPress media folder.

This first photo deserves an explanation. Here in Northern California, there is always a threat of wildfires in the hot, dry summers. That is why there is a weed/vegetation abatement program throughout the region. Residents are required to cut back dry weeds and vegetation on their properties in order to create firebreaks in the event of wildfires. The deadline for completing the weed abatement was yesterday, May 31.

Our home is situated on top of a hill and behind our property line is a very steep hill that leads down to a house on the next street. The steep hill up to our property line belongs to the house behind and below ours. It is too steep to be useful and so the owners let it go, never cutting the grass, which quickly turns to brown straw-like weeds once the rainy season is over.

So yesterday I took this photo below of our back fence to illustrate our neighbor’s very overgrown weeds and attached it to an online violations form from our local fire protection service for the weed abatement program. I hate to be a tattletale, but I don’t want to put our home at risk in the event of a local wildfire.

I also took this photo below when I came inside to escape the 90° heat we had yesterday. Our dog followed me into our air-conditioned house and plopped down onto her bed in our family room. She immediately rolled over and assumed her favorite relaxing position.

My Last Photo — April ‘24

Fandango24 Comments

Brian, aka Bushboy, posted his monthly Last on the Card prompt, where he asks us to…

  • Post the last photo from your camera’s SD card or the last photo from your phone taken in the month of April.
  • No editing — who cares if it is out of focus, not framed as you would like, or the subject matter didn’t cooperate?
  • No explanations needed — just the photo will do.
  • Create a pingback to Brian’s post or link in the comments.
  • Use the tags “The Last Photo” and #LastOnTheCard.”

I’ve got two things to share with you today. The first is a photograph I took yesterday morning with my iPhone 15 Pro Max of our backyard. Nothing special other than me wanting to show off our backyard. The photo is looking toward the WSW and that’s our fire pit in the middle of the photo. I love our backyard.

The second item is something I’ve never posted on Brian’s Last on the Card before. The evening of the 29th I was walking around and checking out a few of the now close to a dozen and a half tarantula spider holes dotting the back end of our backyard where the ground is mostly mulch-covered when I came across a brave tarantula who seemed to be doing housekeeping around his or her spidey hole. As quietly as I could so as not to spook it, I turned on my iPhone’s video capture function, zoomed in to about 8x, and took this 21-second video. I hope you like it and it doesn’t give you nightmares.

My Last Photo — March ‘24

Fandango16 Comments

Brian, aka Bushboy, posted his monthly Last on the Card prompt, where he asks us to…

  • Post the last photo from your camera’s SD card or the last photo from your phone taken in the month of March.
  • No editing — who cares if it is out of focus, not framed as you would like, or the subject matter didn’t cooperate?
  • No explanations needed — just the photo will do.
  • Create a pingback to Brian’s post or link in the comments.
  • Use the tags “The Last Photo” and #LastOnTheCard.”

I’m doing something a little different today. I’m featuring two photos, but only one was taken by me. The other one was taken by my wife, Mrs. Fandango, last night. She has a Pixel 8 Pro (Google’s smartphone). She was in our backyard with our dog while it was taking care of business, looked up at the western sky, and snapped this picture below, which I thought was share-worthy.

My last photo of the month was more down, literally. We had tons of rain this winter and I took this picture of a tree stump from an old, diseased pine tree we had removed a few years back. In case you can’t tell what you’re seeing, these are mushrooms growing out from between the bark of the tree stump. I thought it looked interesting.

My Last Photo — February ‘24

Fandango11 Comments

Brian, aka Bushboy, posted his monthly Last on the Card prompt, where he asks us to…

  • Post the last photo from your camera’s SD card or the last photo from your phone taken in the month of February.
  • No editing — who cares if it is out of focus, not framed as you would like, or the subject matter didn’t cooperate?
  • No explanations needed — just the photo will do.
  • Create a pingback to Brian’s post or link in the comments.
  • Use the tags “The Last Photo” and #LastOnTheCard.”

As most of you know, I built a waterfall in my backyard. Well, I didn’t build a waterfall, I had a contractor who specializes in building backyard waterfalls build it to my specifications.

I took these two photos below on Wednesday and sent them to the waterfall contractor because the rocks and stones are suddenly covered by an orange slime and my formerly sparkling clear waterfall looks, well, yucky.

The waterfall guy got back to me and said that with all of the rain we’ve had so far this year, a lot of string algae is forming in the ponds and streams around here and that’s what is growing in my waterfall. He said that there is a powdered “algae-buster” I can add to the water three to four times a year to retard the growth of algae and I can powerwash the rocks and stones to remove the surface algae.

Great. One more item on my spring to-do list.

My Last Photo — January ‘24

Fandango5 Comments

Brian, aka Bushboy, posted his monthly Last on the Card prompt, where he asks us to…

  • Post the last photo from your camera’s SD card or the last photo from your phone taken in the month of January.
  • No editing — who cares if it is out of focus, not framed as you would like, or the subject matter didn’t cooperate?
  • No explanations needed — just the photo will do.
  • Create a pingback to Brian’s post or link in the comments.
  • Use the tags “The Last Photo” and #LastOnTheCard.”

This month’s photo was taken at about 5:30 pm this past Sunday when I was coming back into the house after taking my dog for a quick walk around the backyard. I looked up at the western sky and it appeared that the sky was on fire. As I usually do when I post photos here, I shrunk the photos, but when I looked at the shrunk photo below, I noticed that the quality of the image took a big hit. The colors weren’t as vibrant as in the original photo and the photo was darker. This is the resized photo below.

The original photo is 22MP/3.5MB, verses the resized one, above, which is 0.8MP and 332KB. So I decided that, even thought it might be slower to load and will take up more space in my media folder, I’d post the original below.

And yet, it’s still not as vibrant as the original photo on my iPhone looks. I went to my media file in WordPress and noticed that the photo was saved at 3.2MP (rather than its original 22MP) and at 1MB (rather than the original 3.5MB), so the photo above doesn’t have the same brilliance as the original does. Sorry about that.

I didn’t realize that WordPress automatically resized the origin photo. Did you?