Tag Archives: photoshop

art, gardening

proper pesticide application

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In this photo Lt. John Pike of the police force of the University of California, Davis demonstrates the proper way to apply pesticides and fungicides in your garden. The lieutenant’s top tips:

  • Wear gloves! The stuff is gross. Keep it off your hands.
  • Wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts. You don’t want the nasty stuff on you!
  • Pick a day with little or no wind. You want to control exactly where the poison goes.
  • Apply from the distance recommended by the manufacturer. The product label should tell you. Too close, you waste material. Too far, you risk ineffective coverage and your treatment won’t have the desired effect.
  • Wear eye protection. I know, I know. I don’t have the visor down in the photo. Silly me. Don’t do as I do, just do as I say!

The riot-gear helmet is entirely optional, but a respirator–or at least a mask–is a really good idea. Happy spraying!

For other parodies of last Friday’s UC Davis pepper spray incident check out:
[ tumblr ]
[ Huffington Post ]
[ The New York Times ]

And why stop there? Invite Lt. Pike over to tomorrow’s Thanksgiving pictures! Entice him into your vacation pictures with your ex! And what better way to improve those musty family pictures with the siblings you’re not sure you’re really related to?

art, gardening

lettuce make art

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head-of-lettuce

A woman in my office brought in a couple flats of lettuces that her father had grown. Every few months the father’s garden gets to that exuberant point where there’s no way you can begin to eat everything it produces. What better thing to do with it than share?

lettuce-closeup

I brought home a couple heads that are making their way into salads. People rave about the difference between home-grown and store-bought tomatoes, but lettuce can show similar differences. The thick outer stems in the salads had a delicate crunch without the bitterness that you often encounter.

Talking to my coworker she was saying how her father was getting distressed with the new watering restrictions. Apparently he was used to watering his vegetables every day. She was trying to assure him that cutting back to every other day probably wouldn’t make much difference, even in midsummer.

morphed-lettuce

In addition to salad I made this abstraction using another closeup of the lettuce as a source. This employs the much-overused Find Edges filter in Photoshop, in combination with a couple of other controls. I tried to keep just a hint of the lettuce to credit the biological source of the image. It’s a desktop doodle at this point, and I’m not sure I’ll do anything with it.

So, is this what they call playing with your food?