A glorious day here at Beatification Central, and for his second miracle The Old Pole laid on an excellent display of silver-lined clouds. So, naturally, I had to try and capture it.

Someday I’ll think of something more interesting to do with all this technology.

This morning on Facebook I leaked that I had “two kinds of messing about commingling to produce … something rather wonderful”. And finally, the results are in. Not wonderful, but not bad either.

Messing about number 1: making Dan Lepard’s Black Pepper Rye bread, in quantity. There’s not a lot I have to add to previous postings on the subject. I now have it down pat, more or less, adding 50 ml extra water per loaf to the scalded rye before mixing in the salt, yeast and the remainder of the flour. That gives a much lighter dough which, while sticky, is hugely easier to handle than the version I get from the recipe unaltered. This loaf has absolutely become one of my alltime favourites, always reliable, always tasty, and always gratifying.

Messing about number 2: installing CHDK on my Canon Powershot SD550. CHDK is the Canon Hack Development Kit. In essence it unlocks all the little features that Canon, in its wisdom, restricts in most of its cameras (which is almost certainly A Good Thing). It also has a scripting language that allows you to control the camera and persuade it to do things surely unthinkable in a point-and-shoot.

Like capturing lightning. Or HDR timelapse movies. And lots of other things too, such as taking movies from the edge of space and what have you. I originally got it to play with shooting RAW on the G7 I just inherited from the Main Squeeze. Not that there’s anything wrong with the G7′s JPGs, just that I think a person who considers himself a bit of a photographer needs to understand how to work with RAW files. Pretty geeky, huh? Anyway, having unleashed the G7′s might, I didn’t want the SD550 to feel abandoned, so I CHDKed that one too, and added a script that gives you a pretty simple timelapse facility. What better to point it at than my bread?

Plenty of things, as it turned out, but we’re talking proof of principle here. The dough rose proofed fine, as it happened, although it doesn’t amount to much in the video because I failed to understand one of the crucial settings in the timelapse script. That’s 2.5 kg of dough there, and the total time elapsed is about an hour, shown as three chunks of 10 minutes.

As for the shaped loaves rising, I naturally forgot that the light would be failing while we were out walking the dog and the SD550 was snapping its little heart out. The eye of faith, however, can clearly see the loaves plumping nicely.

The bread turned out just fine. Timelapse, however, needs a little work. But this CGHDK thing could clearly be an enormous time thief given half a chance.

Been waiting, each morning and each evening, for these.

They pruned a palm next door. What were they thinking? Plonkers.

The moonflowers (Ipomoea alba) are almost as pleasing as the Plumeria (which is still putting on a show). Not quite, because the plant itself is a bit raggedy; the leaves look like they’ve got a severe case of mosaic virus or some such, and the stem bottoms are bare and not very attractive. But hey, they’re in a small trough and have been somewhat erratically watered, and they’re catching the brunt of the wind. So all in all, I’m pretty pleased.

Why the fuss? I’ve read about moonflowers in all sorts of places, and always found them fascinating. They open around sunset, often very suddenly. If your timing is right, apparently, you can see them unfurl as you watch. They’re pollinated by large moths. And the next morning, they’re over. What’s not to like?

The fact that they need warmth, which I’ve not had before, and which I’ve now got in spades. So I persuaded a visitor to bring me a couple of packs of seed (I didn’t realise then that they seem to be freely available on eBay). They grew like the clappers, quickly scrambling to the top of the trellis, and beyond. But no sign of flowers. I figured maybe they needed shortening days, and just as I was leaving at the end of July I thought there might have been some very baby flower buds in the leaf axils. There were, and two weeks later when I returned dead flowers on the paving and buds ready to open.

Photographing them is hard. They open as the light is fading, at one of the windiest times of day. Flash makes them look hard. But without flash it’s not easy to get a sharp image. I tried holding a flower still with a plamp, but the corolla tube is so delicate that the jaws perforated it. Still, I had to try …

Moonflower 4.jpg

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Frozen in the flash Mk I

Can I imitate a moth sufficiently well that the flowers will set seeds? Maybe so. I’ve tried three nights in a row, and I’ve a feeling that the limp petals remain longer on a fertilized flower, but I can’t be sure. It would be nice not to have to beg them from friends or seek them out on eBay. Who knows, could be a nice little earner.

I’m looking forward to having a little more leisure the week after next, so that we can sit on the terrace, G&T in hand, home-grown lemon in G&T, and stare at the buds until we force one to expand in front of our eyes.