Mermaid’s Purses become dry, black and brittle when they dry out on the beach. So they look very different from the fresh ones which are olive brown colour and translucent. The egg and embryo can often be seen within the egg case when it is fresh.

These photographs show the dessicated, black egg case of a Skate or Ray. These are different from the fresh Dogfish egg cases illustrated in the previous posts, Mermaid’s Purses at Fall Bay and Some more Mermaid’s Purses from Gower. Dog fish egg cases are a more elongated rectangle with curling tendrils on each corner that are used to attach the cases to seaweed or other objects. The Skate egg case, in comparison, is squarer in outline and has stiff curving spikes on each corner.

© Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog, 2009. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material, including both text and photographs, without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 Photographs in this blog are copyright property of Jessica Winder with all rights reserved

The Cat Piano: A City of Imprisoned Singing Cats

The Cat Piano is an award-winning 8-minute animated short film directed by Australian filmmakers Eddie White and Ari Gibson, featuring narration by the iconic Australian musician Nick Cave. The film is a remarkable animation, a visual marvel that’s a perfectly executed narrative, seamlessly coalescing its gothic influences into a hypnotically sinister aesthetic that is never at odds with itself.  The Cat Piano was named last week as one of 10 films to advance in the Animated Short Films category for the 82nd Annual Academy Awards.

The story opens in a city of musically talented singing cats, where a lonely beat poet falls for the call of a beautiful musical siren.  However, a mysteriously dark and evil human soon emerges and begins kidnapping the town’s singing cats to imprison them inside of a cat piano, intent on carrying out his depraved musical plans to perform a twisted feline symphony.  At that point, the poet realizes that he must save his muse and put an end to the nefarious tune that threatens to destroy the entire city.

The Cat Piano: A City of Imprisoned Singing Cats

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December 1st i’ll be spinning at PYT in the Piazza. Wrecking shop.

Open bar

A Matter of Loaf and Death: Big Trouble at the Mill

A Matter of Loaf and Death is an award-winning, delightful clay-animated short film directed by Nick Clark, a four-time Academy Award-winning English filmmaker of stop-motion animation.  The film, starring the much-loved duo Wallace and his faithful dog Gromit, was named last week as one of 10 films to advance in the Animated Short Films category for the 82nd Annual Academy Awards.  A Matter of Loaf and Death played on BBC Television last year and was the highest-rated program of 2008 and the highest-rated non-sporting event in the United Kingdom since 2004.  In 2008, the film won the BAFTA Award for Best Short Animation and the Annie Award for Best Animated Short Subject.

A Matter of Loaf and Death is a suspenseful, romantic high-action murder mystery, with Wallace and and the ever-trusty Gromit starting a new bakery business, Top Bun.  Gromit learns that a number of bakers in town have been mysteriously disappearing, and tries to solve the case before Wallace ends up a victim himself.  The mystery involves a new love interest for Wallace, Ms. Piella Bakewell, who is a bread enthusiast and former pin-up girl for the “Bake-O-Lite” bread company, as well as, for the first time, a cute sweetheart for Gromit: Ms. Bakewell’s charming little French poodle, Fluffles.  The very urgent question now is: will Gromit be able to discover the identity of the Cereal Killer before poor Wallace ends up becoming the next ghastly victim?

done

A Matter of Loaf and Death: Big Trouble at the Mill

The full-version of A Matter of Loaf and Death can also be viewed here.

Slide Show: A Matter of Loaf and Death

(Please Click Image to View Slide Show)

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I know… not so much. This street eats truck is located out front of Toronto’s Silly Hall (some still call it City Hall). I can’t recall the last time I ate from a truck out front of City Hall. I do like the hot dogs you get from the carts outside of Canadian Tire stores. I try to stay away from that sort of food. It’s not easy. I was attracted to this scene by the lights and the fact I could get up on a raised platform (about 3 ft off the ground) to shoot this photo. I actually really like this photo in black & white, too. It was hard to decide which to post.

Venezia: Food and Dreams

Venezia: Food and Dreams.  While Venezia contains a number of uniquely delicious recipes, it cannot be called cookbook but perhaps more appropriately referred to as a work of art. It is among the most beautiful books I’ve seen with a flower and food decorating the cover which is so inviting it also comes with a black velvet ribbon bookmark.

The dedication page reads, “For Venice – may you stand strong and beautiful forever.” The full-color,page filled photographs by Manos Charzikonstantis are spectacular. I absolutely love this beautiful work of art! The pages are beautiful works and this is a book to treasure as well as dream about.  Now I want to go to Venice!

          One day the holy spirit came over me and I suddenly began work on my digital portfolio. I’m not so happy with it but I’m still proud of it. Its a small step I’m taking to begin to be my own boss. I’m definitely grinding, on You Tube learning techniques and PhotoShop tricks. I have a very big vision with my photography and it has nothing to do with money. I hope to one day use the camera as a tool in my art work. A different way for me to express my self. I personally have no interest in shooting people, but its something I think I have to do for now in order to gain means to expand my self. You’ll also see various photos of me posing, I also have no interest in being shot but I use my self because I’m easily disposable when I get ideas. Working on my profile I realized that I have to change the angle in which I shoot. I found that I could have scraped about 95% of my stock photography, thats how unhappy I was with them when viewing them from a 2nd perspective. I hope one day to dabble in film photography and learn the classic methods of photography.
          Real Depth Of Field is a metaphor I created. By definition Depth of field is the sharp portion of an image captured by a camera. In the same way I feel I have a deep, clear (sharp) knowledge of things in front of me.
          Like I said, I have a long way to go, but I finally have something of substance that I can challenge my self with. I hope to sweat but I’m most looking forward to bleed.
          Let the growth of a man begin.

Below is the design I created for my Business cards. Inspired by the display settings on my Canon Rebel XSI. The back of the card is the front of an SLR camera. The idea is that you hold the card up to your face and pretend to take a photo, while the front of the card is the display setting.

Back of card:

Front of card:

SPREAD THE WORD
Visit www.RealDepthOfField.com

Inspired by fellow blogger SevenDead, I’ve been playing around with TiltShift Maker, an online application that manipulates images to look like model photos.

Inspired by actually being able to remember my iTunes password, I have added CatPaint to my iPhone’s photo arsenal. Happy Thanksgiving indeed.

Black Student Union (formerly the Afrikan Student Union) Records, University of California, Irvine. AS-098. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.

Students of the 1997-1998 Afrikan Student Union (currently the Black Student Union) were active participants in UC Irvine’s Rainbow Festival and Conference in November 1997. These photographs were included in scrapbooks created by the organization to document events and activities during the academic year.

The festival was founded in November 1984 as a campus wide celebration of cultural and ethnic diversity and has remained one of UC Irvine’s most festive traditions. The popular multicultural program has served as a model for numerous other colleges and universities.

The ragged tree stumps and roots, strewn over the seashore at Broughton Bay on the north coast of the Gower Peninsula, are the remains of a birch tundra woodland that once covered the ancient land surface. They lie in position, just as they were growing before they were inundated. Ten thousand years ago in the Pleistocene Period, a large river, fed by tributaries such as the Loughor, occupied what is now the Bristol Channel with its Atlantic waters. The last extension of the ice sheets in this area, during the late Devensian Period, had been about 8,500 years earlier. As the ice receded up into the valleys of South Wales, the climate had warmed up and allowed vegetation to flourish. The sea level at that time was about 22.5 metres lower than it is at the present.

By the beginning of the Neolithic Period 5,700 years ago, however, the sea level began to rise because of the increasing volume of global meltwater and  its accompanying land subsidence. The forests and peat bogs of the coastal margins were submerged and buried in sediment…..until the 1980s when the remains began to reappear on Gower shores as the surface sediments began to erode away. Now, large expanses of Broughton beach have been stripped of sand showing the strata and entrapped woodland beneath.

Wood from these ancient forests is visible on the seashores of  Swansea Bay and Port Eynon on the south Gower coast as well. Large blocks of peat dating from this time also wash up on the sand at Whiteford – the next bay to Broughton. The plant species already recorded include silver birch, hazel, alder, elder, deergrass, rushes, irises and spurges. As I understand it, no full investigation of this palaeo-environment has yet been conducted. I hope that full attention can soon be given to this valuable evidence before the rapid rate of erosion destroys all that is readily accessible between tides. 

© Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog, 2009. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material, including both text and photographs, without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Jessica Winder and Jessica’s Nature Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 Photographs in this blog are copyright property of Jessica Winder with all rights reserved

www.mariezamora.net
19 September 2009
Stockton, UT

Hailey asked me to take some photos for her as a way to celebrate her recent weight loss (she looks amazing!) and to try and recapture some lost photos from her high school year of her dancing.