The Flickr Divide Image Generatr

The wind was blowing hard from the left and the light was coming in low and hot from the right. By chance, the reddish egret stood just so to create this even divide.

This reddish egret (white morph) is the same one as posted earlier doing a mating dance with another reddish egret. The two images look starkly different and yet they were taken only 9 minutes apart from each other. I don't remember how that happened. I suspect with the first image there was a cloud covering the sun so the light wasn't harsh. Here the light was blazing and I probably instinctively raised the shutter speed which led to the high contrast. Nice to have two images from basically the same moment that look so different from each other.

Chlorargyrite from Nevada, USA.

A mineral is a naturally-occurring, solid, inorganic, crystalline substance having a fairly definite chemical composition and having fairly definite physical properties. At its simplest, a mineral is a naturally-occurring solid chemical. Currently, there are over 6100 named and described minerals - about 200 of them are common and about 20 of them are very common. Mineral classification is based on anion chemistry. Major categories of minerals are: elements, sulfides, oxides, halides, carbonates, sulfates, phosphates, and silicates.

The halides are the "salt minerals", and have one or more of the following anions: Cl-, F-, I-, Br-.

Chlorargyrite, also known as cerargyrite, is a scarce silver chloride mineral, AgCl. It is nicknamed "horn silver" by miners, in reference to its waxy appearance and consistency. It has a hardness of about 2 on the Mohs Hardness Scale. Chlorargyrite's fresh surfaces are clear to whitish to various shades of green. When exposed to light, the colors change to purplish-brownish, bluish, and blackish - these are silver oxide coatings ("tarnish"). At the surface, near secondary enrichment zones, large deposits of chlorargyrite may occur. A six ton mass of chlorargyrite was once found at Treasure Hill, Nevada.

Locality: Falcon Pit, Tonopah Divide Mine, Tonopah Mining District, San Antonio Mountains, western Nye County, southwestern Nevada, USA
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Photo gallery of chlorargyrite:
www.mindat.org/gallery.php?min=1014

Westlake Park / MacArthur Park, Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Thirty-seventh in the series "Wild Bonsai", this tree is 24 inches (0.6m) in height and perhaps 400 years old.

*in explore

"Wild Bonsai" is a numbered collection of photos of naturally occurring bristlecones (p. longaeva) generally less than five feet in height (1.5m) and - as nearly as I can estimate - between fifty and five-hundred years old - some much older. Most will have sprouted and survived in tiny cracks and crevices or miniature basins of sand and gravel. Shaped by the elements, flourishing tenaciously in the most minimalist of conditions, their lives are measured not in the millennia of more robust bristlecones, but in centuries...often mere decades.

"Duality", the cover photo for this album, is to me a matriarch of sorts and will remain unnumbered as a small token of a deeply intuitive and unapologetic respect that remains as transcendent and mysterious to me as it may seem odd to others. The essay that accompanies 'Duality' could, in many ways, apply as well to any other tree I may post in this series.

A perspective: Housed in the Tokyo Imperial Palace, the fifth oldest living cultivated bonsai in the world is estimated by ancient documents to be at least 500 years old and is a designated National Treasure of Japan. The exact age of the bonsai remains unknown, as any such attempted determination would be invasive, and contrary to a national reverence and respect for such historical artifacts.