Botany Bay

Playing with the breakfast orange yesterday, having been taught that morello cherries should be picked with nail scissors, I got to wondering about whether one need to cut the orange from the tree or whether a twist would get it off without damage. In this particular case about an eighth of an inch of stalk had been left on the orange, but the stalk came away from the orange easily enough to reveal a micro structure I had never noticed before, with the circle of dots perhaps corresponding to the segments inside the orange, with one feeding tube for each segment.

Thinking to share this interesting observation, whipped out the (bottom of the range) Lumia telephone to find out that it coped surprisingly well, provided that one used the half press the button to focus feature. This shot was taken from about two inches (with the Lumia giving up if you got any closer than that), and cropped using Paint from Microsoft, with Paint actually doing the job for once, it not being a product well suited to cropping. What you see is the orange end of the stalk, the convex surface which bonds to the pale concave depression in the top of the orange. Shadow of the parent orange just visible top right.

I did get around to loading the gimp mentioned on 18th June, and it would no doubt do the job properly, but it is a rather sophisticated product and it is going to take quality time to learn even how to do something simple. I have only got as far as finding out that it is apt to store its pictures in some proprietary format which nothing else understands, a tribute to the sophistication of its approach to the photographic art. Maybe I will get there one day.