Mine, when I have time for it, is photography. I'll still post some photos, like the mouse below, to this blog; but now I have a separate blog for those images I would (if I weren't worried about sounding like a complete wanker) call "my art". The link is at the top of the new column at left, where I'll manually add thumbnails from that blog. It's at Expressions.com, because I haven't the time to make exactly what I want and of all the photoblogging services I tried, only Expressions gave me enough control over the format to make it (nearly) as simple as I wanted.

So. Fwiw, there it is. Hat tip, again, to Andrew and Ralf.

In case anyone was wondering, this is the sort of thing I do all day. That cotton-candy-looking stuff is mouse genomic DNA, about 600 micrograms of it, harvested from a tumor caused (we're trying to find out how) by deletion of the MNT gene in T cells. I was going to try to say something profound, but the little DNA monster (the "eyes" are air bubbles trapped when the DNA came out of solution) rather deflated my pomposity.

I have the dreaded lurgy. It's not the Martian Death Flu, but it's not much fun either and my brain feels like it's packed in cotton wool, so in lieu of real content here is some flower porn:

When I lived in Brisbane, daylillies were the harbingers of Spring; here in Portland, it's daffodils. Also cherry trees, tulips, magnolias, camelias, pansies and several flowers I don't yet know the names of. Portland is a good place to live if you like flowers. (Or if you don't.)

This is an old trick, but I never tire of it. What you do is shoot a pale flower against a dark background (the foliage will usually do), and expose for the highlights or even one stop over. Then simply process the print or digital negative so that the background is black.

That is a photo, but it's a photo of the shadow KC cast as she sat in the front window. I didn't have time to grab the tripod so it was underexposed, hence the noise from altering levels and sharpening in PhotoShop. I'd prefer it sharp, I think, but I like it well enough this way.

Although I only ended up with four I like, I made more than sixty images of this lunch area where I work. I like the top image best, and it's the closest to what I had in mind when I started.

I have something of an obsession with sunlight.

I'm often bored waiting for the bus.

It's usually dark when I leave work, so I made much of this sunlight.

I'll probably continue to post self-portraits every now and then; it'll be interesting to watch me age. Interesting to me, I mean. What, you thought I did this for other people to read?

(Five brownie points to the first commenter to explain the title.)

Edward Hopper once said that all he ever really wanted to paint was sunlight on a wall, a comment that affected me powerfully when I first read it and has remained with me ever since. I think of it often, particularly when I see something simple and beautiful. This is sunlight in the corridor at work.

(Amanda: the unaltered originals of those shots, and a couple of others, are here. Apart from cropping and resizing, the only things I did to the smaller versions above was sharpened them slightly and altered the levels a little. If you don't have the requisite software I'll be happy to make whatever alterations you want to the larger versions.)

Phooey. The full image is too busy, even after I deliberately lost a lot of shadow detail, but the cropped version is oddly proportioned and spoiled by that burned-out area on the wall.

(The top image is a humongous file because I wanted to avoid compression artefacts; don't look too closely at the gazania either!)