Hole in the bottom of an ancient ocean, Badwater Basin, Death Valley National Park in southeastern California, USA, 282 feet below sea level. Some months of the year it gets very hot and dry there, but the ancient ocean sand beneath your feet may still be wet and stick to the soles of your shoes. Sometimes it rains in Death Valley and water runs down from the surrounding mountains to this lowest area and sinks into the salty sand to gradually percolate upward and keep the surface wet, even when temperatures approach 130°F under a blazing sun.

What made the actual hole here? Not sure, but maybe during a time of rare heavier rain, more water than usual flowed underground and percolated upward at this spot, carrying with it the ancient ocean sand.

The Krystal Kones are actually dried-up, gray seedpods on a weed stalk that I photographed in late spring after they had survived the previous long winter. They reminded me of coral growing on an ocean reef and gave me the idea to place one over the hole in the ancient ocean floor in Death Valley and add some blue water to cool things down a bit. Pink coral—Krystal Kones—probably don't like 130°F temperatures.

The final episode of As The Downy World Turns. After the final photo shown here they flew away.

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You suppose that's why she's holding his feet so they don't claw each other's eyes out?

Where in the world might this be located?

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May the leaf rise up to meet you. Well done.

I attached an iPhone XR with a Moment Wide Angle lens to a tripod and set it up a short distance from our suet feeder. I used a bluetooth device to trigger the iPhone camera from about 15 meters away. I generally expect to see various birds coming and going to consume one of these blocks of suet in about three days. Thus I set up the camera to take still photos and not videos. It would have been much better to get a video of this action scene because it went on continuously for more than five minutes. Here is a sampling of more than 100 images I shot in that time interval.

Ms Downy, the one without the red spot, landed on the feeder first and began eating. Then Mr Downy landed about two minutes later, shortly before the first image shown here. Some moments later Ms Downy sensed that something was amiss, and the battle or love spat commenced. I stayed out of it. Right after the last image shown here they flew away.

To get a good understanding of the iPhone's macro lens ability to magnify at 2cm working distance, get a good quality ruler with clear and sharp mm markings. Plastic or metal will work. Place the iPhone on a tripod and get the lens perfectly parallel to the ruler surface. Bring the lens as close to the ruler as possible and still keep the markings in sharp focus. Check out this video to see the problems with this lens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3q85TbmyOI The problem is that the lens gets only the center part of the image, about 25% of it, in sharp focus and the rest is somewhat fuzzy, as can be seen by the spread-out and fuzzy mm marking lines. This limitation is because Apple had to squat down the macro lens to keep it from protruding out from the phone face. The macro lens performance is still great, but it may not produce the best quality images at maximum magnification. The Moment macro lens doesn't appear to have this problem because they can poke their lenses out from the phone's face and presumably get more uniform focus across the lens.

That's a great idea. I have the hardware and software. Now I just need the grey matter.

Let's see. The life of a dandelion may be several weeks, and I probably don't want to leave my iPhone sitting outside on a small tripod that whole time, snapping an image every now and then. But I don't go anywhere so my alternative is to securely anchor down the small tripod with iPhone mount securely attached so the combination won't move when I attach my iPhone and remove it. Next, I set up CameraPixels to handle nominal conditions and go from there.

The problems I see are, 1. Light and environmental conditions will change during the day and from day to day, 2. The dandelion grows on a stem and will change locations during the day and from day to day, and 3. Because the dandelion is on a stem, even light breezes will cause it to move while it's being focus bracketed, resulting in blurred images.

The possible solutions might be. Time lapse photography is somewhat forgiving of exposure and alignment errors associated with a slowly moving target. In essence, I expect that the tripod, mount, and camera system will have to be repositioned periodically as the dandelion grows, because the lens must be placed quite close to the flower to get the desired macro magnification. I will have previous images of the flower on my laptop and try to match the current image on my iPhone with the latest of them. Likewise I will try to match exposure, etc of the current image with previous ones for best continuity.

The third issue is a very delicate one. I must fabricate or obtain a small loop clamp to close around the dandelion stem right below the flower and out of sight from the camera to minimize its movement from air currents. And this clamp cannot damage the stem in any way because the flower will depend on it its whole life. Maybe a better idea would be to fabricate a small plastic tent that each time would be set down over the whole setup. The tent would let in the needed light but block wind and rain when made of clear plastic.

One more item. What if the subject dandelion is damaged for whatever reason and is no longer suitable for further time lapse photographing? The good news is previous surveys have shown that our yard contains in the vicinity of 1.3 million dandelions at any given time, so I would simply search out another similar-looking dandelion of equal maturity and commence photographing it. Would that be considered cheating?

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Now it's time for our next episode of Downy Soap Opera. Believe me, I'm not talented enough to make this stuff up, so I just let them improvise what may be an evolving love story, maybe? I've read that downy woodpeckers will fight other birds, often ones a lot bigger than themselves. And male downy woodpeckers will fight each other over their favorite female downy. But a gal and guy downy couple going at it, I've never seen that. Could this be a lovers' spat?

This was not a passing moment but went on for several minutes with a lot of noise and commotion. I took well over a hundred pictures, and this is a sampling. Now I wish that I had set up the iPhone camera to take a video, but who would have expected to see anything like this? It it apparent that tempers are about to really flare, and you ain't seen nothing yet. Stay tuned for the final episode of As The Downy World Turns on March 31.

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This was sort of brought up here https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-711524-1.html

First of all I can't won't wear bifocals and I need 2X reading glasses to see clearly close up. Except, I don't need anything extra to see sharply in a viewfinder. But iPhones don't have viewfinders, and in bright sunlight, unless one turns up the brightness to max and runs down the battery, the screen looks more like black granite, and fuzzy to boot, without my 2X reading glasses. What to do? Some at the above link suggested sun shades, but even they won't solve my fuzzy viewing problem and are only partially effective.

I went on Amazon and got an Elvid OptiView 50 3.2" LCD Viewfinder for 50 bucks. The viewing area is about 1.75 by 2.75 inches, quite a bit smaller than the iPhone screen. But at least I can see this part very sharp and magnified 2X, even in bright sunlight without having to run down the iPhone battery. They don't seem to make similar larger beasts to cover an entire iPhone screen, so I just make do by moving it around.

Anyone aware of other practical iPhone viewfinder solutions that don't cost an arm and leg? Having to put on my reading glasses every time I compose a subject is not appealing, which is why I like that my regular Canon EOS R camera has a viewfinder that I may adjust exactly to my eye.

It is sad that I grew up in the years 1943-1962 and didn't interact with a single black person. In the all-white environment I grew up in, we were taught to fear black people. I attended Burlington (Iowa) Community College with Bobby Joe Hill in 1962-1963. At 5' 11" we were the same height, but all other comparisons stop right there. He was simply amazing, even considering the fact that discrimination was rampant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Joe_Hill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_Road_(film)
Note: The second link to the film doesn't work properly here, so it will be necessary to change to the proper link when viewing the Wiki page this link points to.

Ava'sPapa, according to the guy in the know, the iPhone 13 Pro Max is better.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/iphone-13-vs-iphone-xr-camera-comparison

However, I do not believe the iPhone 13 Pro Max would be able to produce images like these obtained from my iPhone XR without the aid of an attached macro or closeup lens, focus bracketing and stacking, and some additional post processing in a photo editor like Photoshop or Affinity Photo.

These images were taken with an iPhone XR and Moment macro lens. The macro lens has a focus range of just one centimeter, which is why only the near part of each dandelion head is in focus. The CameraPixels app was used to focus bracket 50 images, which were then aligned and stacked in Affinity Photo. Affinity Photo was used to post process the images and clip off the bottom portion of the first one.

The dandelion is indeed a strange plant. After the yellow head forms it will spend a week or more soaking up the sun's energy to produce those strange protrusions that get longer each day. As the sun goes down, the flower closes shop for the night and will open back up the next morning. Then one evening when we've been distracted by millions of other nearby dandelions, this one closes shop for what seems like good. But a few days later it opens back up, this time with a big head of gray hair comprising the feathery seed sails that will slowly drift away in the breeze to start more dandelions in our yard.

When the dandelions start coming out in a few days I'm going to locate an emerging one in a sunny and safe spot and place a marker near it so I can return to it periodically. I will visit it morning, noon, and evening to see it opening up for the day, soaking up the sunlight during the day, and closing up shop for the night. Then I will take as close of a sharp photo of it as possible morning, noon, and evening to get decently sharp images. I will repeat this each day until the final head of seed sails pops open and eventually they all sail away in the breeze. You all may want to try something like that too.

Dandelion shortly before it closes up to produce its light gray seed sails.

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Dandelion head with seeds and sails, some blown away in the wind.

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One day I was cleaning leaves and weeds from around one of our hickory trees when I spotted a tiny, bright red something. I carefully unearthed a small rotted piece of wood about 1/2 inch in diameter and a couple inches long. Growing out of this rotting wood was this tiny fungi, the whole thing about 1/4 inch across. I set up my iPhone XR with Moment macro lens on a tripod, used CameraPixels app to get 50 images, and aligned and stacked the images in Affinity Photo. Finally I used Affinity Photo to enhance and clean up the image, such as removing a bit of dirt here and there.

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The PhotoPillar folks are the best and willing to share so much.