Tag: closeup photography

From “Partridge Sky” by Huang T’ing-Chien in Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry, edited by Wu-Chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo:

The chill of dawn grows on the tips of yellow chrysanthemum twigs.
In this life, don’t let the winecups be dry!
Before the wind, play the flute aslant in the rain;
When drunk, pin flowers on the hat and wear it upside down!

While my health remains,
Let me eat well,
And enjoy dancing skirts and singing castanets to the full!
Let the yellow flowers and my white hair entangle each other
To make a spectacle for the scornful eyes of my fellow men!

From “Chrysanthemum and Stone” in Unforgettable Things: Poems by Seo Jeong-ju:

Stone I got, sweaty from the hill climb,
crystal stone put out its white bud.
I planted that stone by the chrysanthemums.

Under the yellow chrysanthemums mother planted and grew,
I set my stone down too, every morning
gave it water to make it grow.

Hello!

This is the third of six posts featuring mum varieties from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first post is Midwinter Mums (1 of 6), and the second post is Midwinter Mums (2 of 6).

I’ve split a batch of thirty-three yellow mum photos between this post and the next one, since they were taken in two different locations with very different lighting conditions. These sixteen were from a spread spilling over an ancient Victorian stone wall — possibly made of stone donated to the city by Queen Victoria (in my imagination) — and were brightly backlit with splashes of sunlight filtering through nearby trees. With the sun in my eyes and the shadow/sun contrasts, I may have missed precise focus on a few of these. If they appear that way to you too then let’s just say it was intentional and the correct way to see them is not that they’re blurry, but that their glowing softly — which is a much more artistic(-sounding) choice, yes?

If you’re interested in learning about a problem I found with galleries on some of my blog posts and a solution, read on. Otherwise, skip down and enjoy the photos!

When working on my most recent Christmas project, I happened to take a look at some Christmas posts from previous years, and discovered that the galleries weren’t working correctly. When I clicked the first image in a gallery, WordPress didn’t show the carousel with the option to move forward to the next image in the gallery — but instead displayed only a single image. To see what I mean, go to Eight Days to Christmas: Red and Green from 2021, select the first image in the first gallery — and notice that you can’t page to the next image in the gallery (and you’ll have to use the browser’s back button to return). I randomly checked a few other older posts and found that they had the same problem: the carousel wasn’t working correctly on many of them. Because I was in the middle of the current Christmas project, I didn’t try to determine what was going wrong — until yesterday when I spent a couple of hours sorting it out.

Once upon a time, the code behind a WordPress site was a lot simpler; and with a smattering of HTML knowledge (which is all I have), I could often figure out why some problem was occurring. As WordPress continued to grow up and especially with the introduction of the Gutenberg or Block Editor, the underlying code got a lot more complicated, with much more scripting and CSS used to format and present a site. All that code is mostly unreadable to me… and yet I try not to be intimidated by tech-stuff I don’t understand, so…

I picked one of the offending posts and brought it up in the Post Editor to see if I could identify what was wrong, previewed it and noticed that the problem had corrected itself. This would seem like a good thing, you might think — but it didn’t help me understand what was wrong, nor how many posts might be affected. So my next step was to compare the code between a newer post that was working correctly and an older one that wasn’t (by using the View Source or Show Page Source function of a browser). Here, for example, is a snippet of code that displays a single image from a gallery:

Nobody knows what this code does (haha!) — and I certainly can’t explain it, but I did recognize that it was part of the gallery/carousel functionality on my site. Vaguely speaking, WordPress generates code like this for each image in a gallery so that you can do things like change the size, background colors, borders, or captions for individual images separately even when they’re part of the same gallery.

In this screenshot I highlighted a bit of code on the third line — < ul class=”blocks-gallery-grid” > — because I noticed that if I looked at the code for a carousel that was working correctly, this bit did not appear. So whatever it did or was originally designed to do, it had apparently been deprecated — and would get removed from a post when I updated it in the WordPress editor, after which the carousel would work as it was supposed to.

It can be difficult to sort out problems with images and galleries on WordPress, mainly (in my opinion) because people use words like gallery, slideshow, and carousel interchangeably and imprecisely, so searching for solutions just sends you down endless rabbit holes. But now armed with something I could work with that I knew was part of the problem — the code < ul class=”blocks-gallery-grid” > — I found this article that describes how WordPress 5.9 introduced a new structure for galleries, and that existing galleries would only be migrated to the new structure when a post was updated with the editor.

I also gathered from this article (much of which made little sense to me) that theme designers could have mitigated the problem for earlier galleries (see the “Backwards Compatibility Considerations” section) — which means you may not have the same dysfunction with these galleries on your site, if the theme developer updated your theme to account for the change. Mine didn’t, and apparently others didn’t either: I picked a few themes at random from the WordPress theme directory, and they all failed to display the older galleries correctly, in some cases not even responding when I clicked on a gallery image.

All this explains why galleries on my older posts don’t work right but new ones are fine — but I don’t know how any non-technical WordPress blogger would have known about this when the change was made and that they might need to do something because of it. Does anyone go back and check older posts when WordPress updates come out? I know I don’t — though I may from now on — and it was two years before I stumbled on the problem on my own site.

Ah, well, “to fix or not to fix” is now the question. If I go to “All Posts” on my WordPress dashboard and search for “blocks-gallery-grid” (include the quotations marks, if you try this on your own site), I learn that there are 101 posts from 2022 and earlier that will all fail to display the galleries correctly. That’s a lot! And each one will need to be opened in the post editor, re-published, then checked to make sure nothing else went wonky. So on the one hand, the broken galleries will nag me and haunt my dreams until I do something about them; on the other hand: waaaaahh! I don’t want to!

But I probably will fix them… maybe I can teach The Dog to do it… wish me luck!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

From “Sentiments at Autumn: Eleven Poems” by Han Yu in Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry, edited by Wu-Chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo:

Chrysanthemum fresh in the frost
what use your beauty so late?
Butterfly cheerful in the fragrance,
your life neither comes too early,
at cycle’s end you both meet
your youth and grace intact till death

Western wind, snakes and dragons hibernate,
all the trees with days’ advance fade and dry
Such are the parts destined by fate….

From “Chrysanthemums” in The Story of Flowers and How They Changed the Way We Live by Noel Kingsbury:

“Chrysanthemum fashions have come and gone for thousands of years. The flower has been cultivated in China for more than 3,000 years, referred to in early records usually as yellow, the colour of certain wild species. They stood out because they bloomed in autumn, after the heat of the summer, and this is one reason for their popularity ever since….

“By the time of the Qin dynasty (221–207 BC) in China there were almost certainly several varieties, since there was a grand market for chrysanthemum sales in the capital, while poets in succeeding dynasties wrote often in its praise. Doubles, a range of colours and multi-hued flowers appeared during the Song dynasty (AD 960–1279), with 400 varieties by 1458, when the first book on the flower was published.

“In Japan, the chrysanthemum took off as a national symbol in the early thirteenth century when Emperor Go-Toba started using one as his personal symbol; other emperors followed, and late in the century it became the royal family’s official symbol. During the Edo period many new varieties were produced and new growing techniques developed, often involving detailed pruning and tying to elaborate frames to shape the plants into pyramids, miniature trees or cascades, or encourage one huge, perfect flower. The latter technique was taken up widely after the plant was introduced to the West in the 1830s.”

From “Chrysanthemums” in Shoes of the Wind: A Book of Poems  by Hilda Conkling:

Dusky red chrysanthemums out of Japan,
With silver-backed petals like armor,
Tell me what you think sometimes?
You have fiery pink in you too…
You all mean loveliness:
You say a word
Of joy.
You come from gardens unknown
Where the sun rises…
You bow your heads to merry little breezes
That run by like fairies of happiness;
You love the wind and woody vines
That outline the forest…
You love brooks and clouds…
Your thoughts are better than my thoughts
When the moon is getting high!

Hello!

This is the second of six posts (that’s a lot!) featuring several varieties of mums from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first post is Midwinter Mums (1 of 6).

Here we have red, red, red ones — blooms from several garden locations that exhibited mostly pure red rather than the red/pink/magenta I described in the previous post. It may be noteworthy that when magenta is absent, the flower petals take on a barely perceptible orange hue when lit by the sun.

Thanks for taking a look!

From “Chrysanthemum (Asteraceae)” in Garden Flora: The Natural and Cultural History of the Plants In Your Garden by Noel Kingsbury:

“One of the world’s most successful commercial flowers, there seems justice in the plant’s name being derived from the Greek for ‘golden flower.’ Once larger, Chrysanthemum is now a much-reduced genus, with around 30 familiar herbaceous or subshrubby species recognised from eastern Europe across to the Far East. Polyploidy and hybridisation are common, so the origin and classification of this and related genera is still in flux….

“Chrysanthemum species are generally long-lived and often clump-forming. Some have persistent semi-woody growth, but others tend to die out in patches. Generally they are from woodland edge habitats, although several are common along seashores in Japan. Species are found in a number of climate zones, with many of those which have contributed to the cultivated gene pool from the Far Eastern humid subtropical zone….

“The Japanese emperor Gotoba (1183–1198) particularly liked the flower and started using a chrysanthemum graphic as his own personal symbol. Other emperors followed suit, and in the late 13th century it became the official royal family symbol. Today, in English-speaking countries, the Japanese ruling institution is sometimes referred to as the Chrysanthemum Throne. In the East, chrysanthemums have tended to be symbolic of long life, which is perhaps another reason for the popularity of chrysanthemum tea; in the West, however, they became a funeral flower during the course of the 19th century and so were frequently, superstitiously excluded from the home, even being seen as a curse in Italy.”

From “The Chrysanthemum” by William Carlos Williams in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, (Vol. II), edited by Christopher MacGowan: 

how shall we tell
the bright petals
from the sun in the
sky concentrically

crowding the branch
save that it yields
in its modesty
to that splendor?

Hello!

Toward the end of November through mid-December of 2023, I encountered some fabulous batches of many-colored mums at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens — but then got wrapped up in my Christmas project and am just getting to those photos now. I suppose technically these are “autumn mums” — but you know I like my alliterations, so I went with “Midwinter Mums” as the post title for this series.

For the first photos in this series, I selected those that had an unusual combination of colors. These mums at first glance appear red — as red is the most dominant color — yet among the red blooms there are quite a few, even from the same multi-bloom stem, that exhibited a distinct color variation that included magenta or pink. On some individual blooms, half the petals were red and half were red and magenta, or magenta appeared toward the center then gradually radiated to red. At first I just thought is was a trick of the light (you know how tricky light can be) and started shifting the magenta toward red in Lightroom — but then set them all back to keep the color variations intact. The first two photos below show how large this group of mums was; and you can see in those photos how magenta appears randomly throughout the cluster.

Thanks for taking a look!