portrait lens

Some pictures taken over break--experimenting with my portrait lens.

portraits

My mom and my friend Jake, taken this past week during break.

harpy eagle claw

An old one, at the Smithsonian's Division of Birds from two summers ago.

thanksgiving dry run

This past weekend I had a Thanksgiving-themed potluck for the first-year med class, for which my classmate Leland prepared an 18-pound turkey for six hours in my kitchen.  Rather than do anything useful (trusting me with food prep is a risky move at best) I followed him around and documented the process.

Old bread ends from Take-It-Away, torn into chunks, for stuffing (add tarragon, scallions, celery, parsley, salt and pepper, and liberal amounts of butter).

Turkey heart (Leland was just as mesmerized as I was by the tiny but humanlike four-chambered heart).

Turkey gizzard set aside to flavor the gravy.  The gizzard is amazingly muscular and tough, used to grind up hard bits in the bird's diet.

The stuffing, pre-addition of the bread.  Dreamy amounts of butter.

The 2.5 pound log of butter purchased for the occasion.

Trussed with its own skin and ready for the oven.  I didn't manage to get any photos of the finished bird, but rest assured it was delicious--moist and flavorful.

breath sounds

A photo from a shoot I did for the Nursing School to get some promotional pictures they could use.  Here's a student practicing a chest exam on a simulation mannequin (these mannequins are unbelievably expensive and can teach anything from delivering babies to various weird trauma surgeries).

blue crabs

sepals

Witch hazel blossoms after the petals dropped, leaving the four-point sepals behind.

pride rock

Caught the golden hour with some friends today at Humpback Rock, a nearby hike on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  

dusky salamander

Always touch a salamander with wet hands...dry fingers can tear their skin.  Click to enlarge to see its tiny toes!

swallowtail and liatris

ginkgo nuts

Fruits of a female ginkgo tree.  These contain a large amount of butyric acid, which is also found in butter and some cheeses.  When the fallen fruits bruise and rot, they release the sharply characteristic odor of butyric acid (reminiscent of vomit...it's what's responsible for the smell of rancid butter).  The nut, found inside the fruit, is edible, but I've never had the nerve--or the stomach--to sift through fallen ginkgo fruits when I have found them around Grounds.  Better to enjoy them while they are still whole and green--and some thirty feet above me on the tree. 

day's eye

As temperatures slip to the fifties, this usually summer-blooming oxeye is a rare sight.

brown marmorated stink bug

These stink bugs become household pests when they enter homes in droves in the early fall to escape the cold nights.  They purportedly smell pretty bad, but I have crushed a few out of curiosity and it's not as unbearable as Wikipedia might have you believe (kind of like oil paint).