09-05-12 Full Bloom

As the flowers fade, the days get shorter and the nights get cooler, mundane shots of a simple flower in summer bloom start to look better and better. I took this photo in late June and the image file was gathering dust amongst the 12,000 photos in my 2012 Aperture library.Canon 5DIII 1/400s f/2.8 ISO400 100mm

07-21-12 Rain Drenched

I have been known to "fake" rain drops by spraying leaves and petals of my garden subjects. But these drops are real: it actually rained the other morning!

07-20-12 Star Gazing

It hard not to notice the star gazer lilies, which just bloomed a few days ago.

07-10-12 Five

There's something about looking at close-ups of flowers that makes me count. And in this flower, five seems to be the recurring number.

6-30-12 Daisy, Daisy, daisy

Not counting the parts of daisies on edges of this photo, there really are three daisies in this photo. "Really?!" you say. Really. This is a layered HDR photo that I made (not took) with my Canon 5D Mark III. It has HDR capacity built in. The things you can do with the new-fangled cameras. . .Incidentally, the title of this post pays homage to the famous scene in Stanley Kubrick's fiLm "2001: A Space Odyssey," where an astronaut "kills" HAL, the on-board computer. (HAL, by the way, is an acronym that is only one letter away from IBM. Coincidence?).When that film came out in 1968, 2001 seemed so far away. And now it's 2012 and we have cameras that are smarter than those who use them. Like me and my 5DIII. . .

05-19-12 About To Bloom

I'm practicing my macro technique again, this time on an Iris that is probably one day away from full bloom. Somehow an iris bud reminds me of the super compact foam toys that blow up to huge proportion when you add water. I guess with an iris you just add water, too.

05-15-12 Life Star

I took exactly one photo of this flower, in part because I had ventured into my neighbor's back yard to look at her flowers. To get one photo, I had to step carefully into the middle of her garden and I felt awkward doing this - especially without her blessing. I need to go back.As for the title, the inspiration was the Star Wars Death Star. Somehow, a cheery purple spherical flower seemed to be the antithesis of the menacing structure in the movie.

Spring Blossom

Flowering crab apple trees are something we normally see at a distance and appreciate for the few days that they flower. This morning I took my camera a moved in for a closer view. And the quantity and coloration of these little flowers was truly amazing. I took about 120 photo, though most are very similar.About half way through my shoot, I realized that I was smiling and that I had been for most of the time I was taking photographs. I guess it's good to find simple joy in the beautiful things that Nature gives us.

Pink

As fall turns to winter, I start thinking about the transience of seasons. Where did summer go?

Standing Out

If you saw yesterday's post you might recognize this flower. Is it really the exact same tulip that Katie is holding? Only the tulip knows.But, like dandelions, this tulip is a genetic clone. It is an exact duplicate of all the other lavender tulips that came in the package of bulbs my wife planted. That's what you get when you have self-pollination and asexual reproduction. Humans, on the other hand, are a rich and varied species. Human duplication (I'm trying not to use the word "sex" here) is a little less convenient but the results are worth it.Which is to say that I'm glad I'm not a tulip. . .

Hot Pink

I remember these as being more purple than pink when I spotted them in the garden. But in the post-processing, this is the color that my white balance adjustments got me. I can live with that. . .

Another View

I think this is the third year I have photographed this lilly and this morning when I took my tripod and camera out to the garden, my goal was to try to see this beautiful plant in a way I hadn't seen it before.I have said before that photographers have the power to define reality by framing the field of view in ways that the human eye and brain don't. Thus, we can show the "big picture" in a way that makes it interesting and we can move in close to show things that people wouldn't normally look at. This photo is an example of this, I think.When I took this photo, I stopped looking at the whole flower and instead looked at its parts, its lines and it colors. I also looked at how these parts related to the background. To me an important compositional element is the way the edges of the leaves define the green space in the middle.Is it a good photo? I'm not sure that I could ever answer that question about one of my pictures. All I know is that I feel I met my goal of giving people a new way to look at the stargazer lilly.