The first of our late-flowering tulips is out, next to the out-house. I’m not much good at flower photography. Studiolum very kindly gave me some tips yesterday — his and Kata’s pictures of their Hungarian garden are superb — and I’m going to try some new moves (this isn’t one of them, obviously).
I spent a couple of hours this afternoon pulling up stinging nettles in the goats’ part of the garden I had heard that goats eat nettles, but they’ve never done so here until today. I found that Misty, who’s the most willing to experiment with new foods,
would eat them once I’d pulled them up . Maybe there’s less stinging that way, I don’t know. I get very stung and it still tingles, but I take a primitive delight in finding the red and yellow shallow roots and ripping them out. It’s approximately the same satisfaction as I’d have if I were George Smiley and I’d discovered a nest of Soviet spies. This is more like Studiolum’s marvelous technique:
although he takes them by the dozen and crops them much more. Oh, well.
A Bad Guide 
Great, Megkoronáz! REALLY great flower photos. I really love them. Perhaps one more trick I always use: to underexpose the pics by one or rather two degrees (10 to 20%). As to cropping, I do not crop them much more than you (I don’t speak about the mosaic tiles but about the images behind them); perhaps I’d do just this much.
Cropping reminds me a saying of the painter József Egry: “You have to take away from the picture very, very much, in order it does not remain completely empty.”
AJP, don’t you have leather gloves? or do you mean you are stung in spite of gloves?
By the way, nettles are edible by humans (cooked, obviously). Nettle soup is very good (nettles and potatoes, for instance), especially with the young nettles now growing. Old nettles can be tough, so don’t wait til the end of the summer. When I lived in the country we used to make a dish of nettles and mushrooms. Totally organic, pesticide (etc) free, and it costs nothing if they both grow on your property.
You’re so kind, Studiolum. I think the underexposure is very important. I’m going through a phase of using the “shadow and highlight” tool in Photoshop, which can often bring out a lot of information that wouldn’t otherwise be visible, but now I see I overdid it on that bottom picture. József Egry’s advice is good to remember; sometimes it’s all or nothing with cropping — Cartier-Bresson didn’t crop at all, of course. It’s brilliant, but I could never be like that.
No, no gloves; my hands are still itching the next morning. Once I’d begun on the spur of the moment I didn’t want to stop. We had nettle soup the other day (with onions), and one day I’m going to make nettle beer. Nettles with mushrooms sounds really good, but by the time we get the mushrooms our nettles are ancient. I suppose we could buy mushrooms.
Maybe you could cut the nettles back a bit, so that you will have a new tender crop when the mushroom season arrives.
In Germany, some foodstuffs got pretty nettled at the second wave of organic eat-fashion that washed over the country somewhere in the 90’s. I’ve always liked the idea and appearance of nettle cheeses. They have lots of short green filaments in them, like the dill in a fish sauce. However, unlike the ordinary fish sauce, the cheeses have themselves turned a very pale green resembling the onset of seasickness. And I’m not sure that I have ever actually tasted something that I would swear to be nettle-taste. It’s so subtle that it may be imaginary. But hey, das Auge ißt mit.
I meant “crop the nettles back a bit”.
That was the technique favored by Ortier-Bresson.
Cartier-Bresson didn’t crop at all
He cropped already with his lens, so to say. I remember, in the 70s and 80s it was a fashion to print the (analog) photos with a slim black frame, to indicate that it was not subsequently cropped but already composed like that.
By coincidence, I’m just about to write about Cartier-Bresson, or rather to translate and illustrate an essay published in El País a propos of his recent exhibition.
Nettles and mushrooms: Most wild mushrooms appear in the fall, when the nettles are old, but some appear in the spring, along with the young nettles. That’s why we could cook them together. These mushrooms were a type of morel – not the regular ones, which are superlative, but they were quite good nevertheless. Morels grow in the spring, and it is hard to confuse them with poisonous mushrooms. (Just don’t take any chances if you are not absolutely sure).
(Just don’t take any chances if you are not absolutely sure)
The morel imperative.