Beautiful light

The clouds were a giant softbox today at the Ornamental Gardens. Lots of light, lots of rich colour, lots of critters.

Bees and Russian sage

From the Ornamental Gardens earlier today. I didn't spend as much time exploring as I had planned (the humidity, oh the humidity) but I did get to check out the organic garden and the cleome patch.

Going to seed

Dahlia love

When I was out erranding yesterday I spotted some dahlia in the cut-flower section of the market. Dahlias are awesome, the way the petals look like scoops and how they unfurl and form petal pom-poms. I've never had the opportunity to photograph them before. To say I was giddy would be an understatement. ;-)

After spending a bit of time with them, I love dahlias even more.



The yellow areas of the orange/red/yellow blooms just glowed, like they were lit from within.

Stacks of petals

Petals of a pink peony above, and white rose below. Fragrant beauties from my garden. Delicious individually, combined their scent is intoxicating.

Nature has never been silent for me. Nature whispers in my ear all the time, and it is the same thing over and over. It is not "Love." It is not "Worship." It is not "Psst! Dig here!"

Nature whispers, and sometimes shouts, "Beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty."

Sharman Apt Russell
Anatomy of a Rose

Mushrooms

Discovered this little clump of mushrooms in the front garden earlier this evening. I think they might be Conocybe albipes.

Garter snakes at Lime Kiln Trail

There were lots of snakes at Lime Kiln today - we counted six. Enjoying the sun, no doubt.

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.

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.