Thursday, February 17, 2011

The End of Procrastination II

At the end of last summer I noticed a Siberian peashrub (Caragana arborescens) growing on the south end of BYU campus. It was near the stairs that lead up from the botany pond [1] to the Benson Building (chemistry building). Since legumes have become a recent fascination of mine [2], I decided to photograph the plant and upload the pictures to Wikimedia Commons (the media repository for Wikipedia). It was at this point that I discovered something unique about the seed pods. Every time I tried to pick one of the seed pods, it would explode in my hand, scattering its seeds everywhere. Then I noticed that some of the seed pods burst open while still on the tree.[3] Only by being very careful was I able to collect some for the photographs. The photos then took up residence on the desktop of my lab computer until last week.

The reason I waited to upload them to Wikimedia Commons is that I wanted to scrub the backgrounds and replace them with a solid color. It isn't that hard to do, I just put off doing it. The photographs I took were off the leaves, the seed pods, and the seeds. I went ahead and uploaded them as-is.[4]




As you can see, the black felt reflected a lot of light and I didn't really like all that texture visible back there. So I used the GIMP [4] to change the backgrounds to a solid color. Here are the final results:




I think they look a little better now. Along with uploading the retouched photographs to Wikimedia Commons, I also included the photo of the seeds on the "Measured seeds" media page (here) and all three on the "Caragana arborescens" media page (here).


Notes:

[1] Also known as the BYU duck pond.

[2] See my post What Is It That Matt Does Anyway?

[3] I'm guessing this is a dispersal mechanism. To learn more about the plant, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caragana_arborescens.

[4] I licensed them using the Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license. This gives other people permission to use my images (on Wikipedia or elsewhere) so long as they 1. identify me (as Ninjatacoshell) as the original author of the work and 2. use the same or equivalent licensing for any derivative works. I use this same license on all of my blog posts (see the bottom of the page).

[5] For more about the GIMP, see my post Raster Graphics and Vector Graphics.

Image attributions:

Caragana arborescens leaf is by Ninjatacoshell, available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caragana_arborescens_leaf.JPG.

Caragana arborescens seed pods are by Ninjatacoshell, available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caragana_arborescens_pods.JPG.

Caragana arborescens seeds are by Ninjatacoshell, available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caragana_arborescens_seeds.JPG.

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