Cheery yellow

At the Ornamental Gardens. Always something cheery blooming there.

(Experimenting w/ flickr's 'blog this' feature - didn't realize how much we could customize the code!)

Going through the archives

Switching flickr accounts, cleaning out hard-drives, re-uploading older (favourite) images, learning the ins-and-outs of Lr .... keeping busy, busy, busy.

Flowers from the garden

The time when early bloomers make way for mid-summer kin. The forget-me-nots and peonies are fading, but the lilies and roses are ready to take their place.

Colourful fish from the New England Aquarium in Boston

Spent some time exploring Boston on a recent trip. It was my first visit. What a great city!

Hosta leaves and Lightroom

After a lot of encouragement (and positive reviews), I finally decided to give Lightroom a try. I downloaded the new version (Lightroom 3) and I'm now trying to get acquainted -- hmmm, comfortable -- w/ using the interface and features. I've always worked w/ Bridge and Photoshop (CS3), so this is a different approach (for me) to photo management and development. The biggest unknown right now: the catalog. Not entirely sure I understand what catalogs are, where they sit, how they interact w/ the folders on the disk, that sort of thing. I'm really loving the lens correction feature (tried it out on a vacation photo taken w/ the 18-200mm lens and was blown away), as well as the export and printing features (ease of adding watermarks and setting output resolutions, sRGB etc., and can see how easy it will be to process a folder of images). The develop module is a bit mysterious at the moment, but the basic features seem similar to those in Camera Raw. Anyways, I'm having fun figuring it out and feel that this is the direction I want to go w/ my photo management and post-processing: organized files, folders and sub-folder structure; ease of imports and exports; simple, clean edits w/ basic tools; automated features to move images through to print or web posting.

New thorns

Red like the blood they'll soon draw.

Bees and roses

Not sure what the previous gardener put in the soil, but I've never seen roses grow so well ... These are from the front garden - growing out of control.

Peony petals

Soft and up-close.

Very large blooms

Cut some peony flowers last night and today they've opened right up. They're big and puffy and very sweet-smelling. I had my assistant ;-) hold a bloom to give some perspective on size. Thanks J!

Tropical Greenhouse is still closed

The Tropical Greenhouse at the Ornamental Gardens has been closed for some time now - closed for renovations. While I was in the area in March, I decided to stop by and see if there were any updates on when it might be reopened. It didn't look like it would be any time soon.