01-30-13 Christmas In January

This cactus lives on a shelf in our main bathroom and during much of the year it just sits there. But once a year, spurred on by forces a photographer like me could never comprehend, it blooms.And when I went into the bathroom a few minutes ago, I wasn't thinking about macro photography. But I couldn't ignore the blooms, which were backlit by soft sunlight filter through thin clouds in the winter sky. And so I abandoned my original mission, and got my camera.Incidentally, this is a Christmas cactus, but given that it is January 30, I think this one is a bit of a nonconformist.Canon 5DIII 1/60s f/4.0 ISO1600 100mm

07-11-12 Twisted Green

I don't know the name of this plant, which was flourishing in Bill and Cathy Zs' garden, but I do know that it fed my penchant for green things with fascinating texture.

Serration

Sooner or later I will run out of plants I photographed last week. Or I will clairvoyantly sense your boredom. But until then, here's another plant.I will tell you that the photographic challenge with this plant was trying to establish a focal point. I was shooting at 2.8 so I would get fairly narrow depth of field. The thinking was that rather than have the you look at the whole plant, I wanted you to see the serrations, the texture and the soft purples and greens.

Green Fingers

I took around 500 photos while I was in California recently. Most of them are of plants. Today, I post yet another example of the flora that grow in southern California.I believe that nothing in nature develops accidentally and when I look at this I wonder about the purpose of all of the parts of this fern and of their design. Maybe a fern expert could chime in. Or maybe I could look it up on Wikipedia. . . .

Green Waves

I was going out to get something from my pickup truck when I noticed that the hosta leaves in a little garden patch outside our front door were backlit by the low sun. So, I forgot my original mission and went and got my camera. I think I took 30 photos but this one, after I cropped it, seemed to offer a good mix of the abstract with the real.By the time I was done taking photos, I had forgotten why I was heading to my truck! Is this evidence of genius or senility? Perhaps neither. . .

10-10-14 Nature in Black and White

I was back in my neighbor's back yard this past weekend looking for photo opportunities. We probably have plenty for me to photograph in our yard but we didn't have hosta plants with big leaves that were giving up the ghost as these were. I turned this photo to a high contrast black and white photo in part because I have been looking at the photography of Edward Weston. I'm not sure I like this photo but here it is anyway.