I mentioned in the album header ("gallery" header for PBase... it's interesting that I'm starting to move away from PBase terms, but I digress) that there is no chance that I'll have the time to do a photo a day all year this year. Eventually other things that I need to do will overtake my photography time, which is why as far as I'm concerned this is still a PESO gallery, not a PAD one, and I'm not posting to any PAD groups on Flickr. (If I average 2 to 3 a week, I'll be happy.)

But for the moment, though, it's still a photo every day. And that means finding new subjects and new approaches. I haven't done B&W this year. I haven't done abstract this year.

Why not do both?!

The agave succulent is a ground based plant whose thick, solid leaves unfurl like a rosette. If you believe most botany textbook the agave is a native of central America. Forsooth. I defy you to drive down any suburban street between Stanwell Park and Port Kembla and NOT find half of the houses with huge clumps of agave in the front yard. Clearly they are native to the northern Illawarra.

Or if they weren't, they are now.

I didn't "get" agaves when I first moved here. Almost everyone had them, and they were OK to look at, but on the plant attractiveness scale I'd have rated them a kind 6. But since then they've grown on me. Yes, they overgrow their boundaries, albeit slowly. No, they don't generate beautifully coloured flowers, or the scent of rosemary. They don't attract birds. But they're undemanding and add some greenery. They're sturdy and reliable and create a pleasant environment... until their time comes.

When that happens, they flower for the last time in their life. A tall stem (or "mast") shoots out of the centre of the rosette. It can, and I've seen this, shoot up to 12 metres (about 40 feet) high. And it happens fast. As in, "I didn't know that things could grow that fast" fast. The stem can't support its own weight and usually doubles over on itself. Having flowered, the plant dies off.

Its children don't. You could launch a thermonuclear missile at one of these things and its "death" will be both real, and transient.

Is a flowering what we're seeing here?

No, I think the spike is just another standard leaf that will unfurl into a new inner ring of the rosette.

I originally had plans to drive to the beach for a sunny lunchtime shot today but the clouds were too unpredictable. I went looking for a more local subject and settled on this. Even this one gave me a bit of grief with the sun shining on it, then vanishing, then reappearing.

I also had to play around with the macro lens settings and f/stops to get the DOF that I wanted. I settled on the 0.19m to infinity setting. I don't really know what the distance was here because I would move back and forth to try to get something that I liked the look of.

I did in the end, but given that the image was all about shape and texture, I thought... how would this go with the colour removed? A few tweaks to the lightness sliders in the B&W filter, and... here we are.

Another day down.