The Yerba Mansa has bloomed along the Rio Grande a little earlier than usual this year, perhaps because of the unusually warm weather and high water.
From a 2009 blog post:
I first encountered Yerba Mansa in a little bog between the road and the Rio Grande about twenty miles north of Las Cruces. The photo of the flower was made on June 9, 2002 using a little 1.3 megapixel OLYMPUS D360-L. A lot of water has flowed down the river since then.
So my initial knowledge of the plant coincided with the beginning of digital photography. Since I made that first picture with the simple little Olympus D360 I have photographed the plant nearly every year since with many of my old film cameras.
Modern medicine has not found a useful remedy in the Yerba Mansa, but many Native American peoples used all parts of the plant to treat every imaginable ailment. I'm thinking perhaps I'll try it this year in a tea.
4 comments:
Your 1.3 megapixel photo looks fabulous on web display on a desktop monitor. I am amazed you were able to capture it without 48 mpixels, 4000 focus points, and with the totally lacking equivalence and dynamic range of that little Olympus. Who would have thought?
Yes, my thought exactly. I actually bought that first little digital camera as a tool for illustrations on my web page that I was using to explore the possibilities of the new World Wide Web. Finding out how easy it was to use, even in extreme close-ups encouraged me to explore the digital imaging realm and ultimately got me back to shooting again with film.
The top photos were taken with the half-frame camera? Nice!
Yes, the 38mm lens really extracts the best possible images from those small negatives. For online display I think it is hard to beat the Pen-FT product. I'm not abandoning my other old cameras however. I'll get back to the Yerba Mansa before this year's bloom has gone by with medium format and maybe some color too.
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