This week’s challenge features Patti Moed and the theme she calls “From Large to Small”. In the response, though, she gave the theme a bit of a twist… the subjects of each image must be in the same colors. She writes, “For this challenge, pick a color and select several photos that feature that color. Start with a photo of a big subject in that color (for example, a wall) and move all the way down to a small subject in that same color (for example, an earring).” You can read her entire challenge post here.

For my opening photo, I picked the largest orange object that I could find in my gallery, the moon. Now, hold on there, I know the moon is usually white in appearance, but on average every 2.5 years, one region of the world will see at total eclipse of the moon. For about an hour or so, the moon takes on an orange glow as the earth’s shadow passes between the sun and the moon. Known colloquially as a “blood moon”, this total eclipse was captured on September 27, 2015 near Moorhead, Minnesota.

Moving from larger to smaller, obviously, quite a bit smaller, the car carrier Toronto is a cargo ship dedicated to carrying vehicles. On April 9, 2019, the shipping company Wallenius Wilhelmsen was carrying a load of cars and other vehicles westbound via the Panama Canal. To give you a reference for size, typical ships of this type are capable of holding 4,000 to 5,000 cars in their multi-story cargo holds.

As a side note, I found it interesting that I could “Google” the shipping company and ship’s name and I could find out its current location. As this post is being written, the ship is transiting the Atlantic Ocean out of Durban, South Africa for Salvador, Brazil, estimated arrival at 9:00 AM on June 12, 2021. Photos of the ship posted there indicate that the ship is no longer orange and has a new gray base and blue trim color scheme.

Going much smaller, this orange Burlington-Northern Santa Fe engine was captured crossing a viaduct over the Grant Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site in Montana. Given that a train engine is a lot smaller than a cargo ship, a couple of these engines could pull upwards of 100 train cars. A double-deck train car might hold 10 to 15 automobiles. I’ll let you do the math, but a reasonable estimate is that it might take five freight trains to move as many cars as that container ship.

I call this New Edge Mustang the #OrangePony. It’s a 2004 (40th Anniversary) Mustang convertible. I keep it garaged during the off-season, but when the weather is nice, it’s top is down and Lynn and I enjoy tooling around in the fresh air.

From car carriers to automobiles, I am staying on the vehicle theme with this item, the next smaller in size. It’s a depiction of a desert highway as viewed from a mid-20th century windshield and dashboard. I found this close to the full-size depiction in the Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico. It is probably my favorite contemporary work in the museum and represents a view of a New Mexico highway. I imagine it to be Route 66. Unfortunately, I neglected to capture the information on the artist. You’ll have to stop by the museum yourself to see the details.

Moving to a different type of transportation, this image features a monocolor view of the windsock at 5N8, Casselton, North Dakota’s airport. I spend most of my time at this airport supporting glider operations for North Dakota Wing Civil Air Patrol. I find myself either helping the ground crew launch and retrieve the glider or piloting the tow plane we are using to launch the glider. If you look closely in the background to the right of the windsock, you can see our glider as we are getting ready to put it away after the day’s flights.

Moving completely away from transportation, getting smaller with each image, here’s a monocolor image of an orange jubilee blossom cluster captured in Arizona in the spring of 2015.

Another sign of springtime in Arizona is the ripening of the Valencia oranges on the tree in our Arizona back yard, usually in late March or early April. Other varieties of orange grown in Arizona are ready to eat as early as December. My lack of knowledge when asking a landscaper to provide us with an orange tree led us to get one that ripens much later than we would have liked. Lesson learned, do your research before you spend your money, dummy. At least, that’s what my wife said.

For my final image, I found this image of a small orange butterfly captured at the Phoenix Desert Botanical Garden’s butterfly exhibit in 2013. I searched pretty hard on Google to find the common name of this species and despite finding many references to types of orange butterflies, I didn’t see an image of a butterfly with so few markings on its orange wings. I leave you, dear reader, with the mystery of the name of these small orange butterflies.

As I have noted recently, I have created an album of these images on Flickr to allow you a more detailed view and in some cases, higher resolution. For those interested in camera and lens details, complete EXIF data is listed below each image. You can find the album gallery here, or click on any image above to go directly to that image in the gallery.

Thanks to Patti for an interesting take involving two metrics in this challenge, color and size.

John Steiner