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Friday Slide Show: Homage to Basil
19 September 2025
We watered the basil yesterday morning, leaving it in the kitchen sink to drain and get a little light from the overcast sky. Then, as we made a cup of coffee, we admired the soft light and bright color.
So we grabbed the iPhone 15 Pro Max and tapped into the Adobe Indigo camera app, picked the 2x zoom and took it's advice to use Macro mode. Then we had some fun shooting the plant at various angles as our coffee cooled.
It's supermarket basil. A convenient-sized pot with too many plants jammed in that are crowding each other out. We have repotted in the past but never each individual plant. We'd have to live on a spacious farm instead of a city lot for that.
Still, with regular watering, even a crammed pot can last a while before the plants turn yellow and the party's over.
We brought them into Lightroom but didn't do much of anything to them (a touch of Dehaze, some Texture). Indigo had nailed it.
As we put the slide show together, though, we wondered if we'd written about this before. We had a vague recollection, as the saying goes.
When you've published and 6,173,120 words in 9,998 articles*, "vague" is pretty clairvoyant. We did shoot our kitchen basil in 2020 using the Olympus E-PL1 and we had a feature on an expired plant in the garden in 2023.
But no macros like this. And not in black-and-white either, which we tried in Lightroom and liked better than the uneven color the iPhone had captured as we changed angles at the sink.
It isn't just that which makes this set different, though. It's the iPhone and Indigo and, well, Lightroom.
Not that they're better that the Olympus images. But they are different.
And we find ourselves encoding the difference in our mind as yet another choice we can make as we survey a subject to determine how we'd like to capture it. It's an option. And every option nourishes us.
