Posts in Category: flowers
Emerging Desert Lavender
Desert plants display many different structural adaptations which help them to retain moisture and resist heat in their harsh environment. How else to explain the furry covering on the Desert Lavender buds? It looks, in this image and this light, very like frost, but I can testify that it was way to warm for frost while I hiked up Palm Canyon in the Anza Borrego Desert the day I found these plants.
I like the macro detail here, the fur and the petals of one delicate flower that has bloomed, and I like the bokeh which catches a feel of the spread of the plant and the rugged mountain against blue sky.
Canon SX50HS. 24mm macro with 1.5x digital tel-converter. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3 EV exposure compensation. f4 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 100. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Fairy Duster
I went to Anza Borrego Desert State Park last month looking for early spring wildflowers. I found a few plants in bloom, but I was really too early by several weeks. This Fairy Duster bloom is in the watered garden around the Visitor Center. For some reason I always want to call it Feather Duster…but it is Fairy.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm macro, plus 1.5x digital tel-converter. f4 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Century Plant: Anza Borrego Desert
The Century Plant (Agave americana) is, of course, totally misnamed. It only lives 10 to 30 years. It does, however, have only one flowering, after which the plant dies back to its root runners, to appear again in a different spot. So, while not once every hundred years, the flowering is rare enough to be an event worth noting. This specimen is in the native plant garden atop the Visitor Center at Anza Borrego Desert State Park. And what a setting for the bloom!
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. From 190 to 1200mm equivalent field of view. Mostly 1/1000th at ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Western Tiger Swallowtail
I am back in Maine after a week in San Diego. I am actually in the car on my way to Montreal where my daughter Kelia has a piano audition today. 🙂 The image, however is definitely California. Western Tiger Swallowtail. As I mentioned a few days ago, on this trip to the San Diego Birding Festival, I spent time in the Tijuana Valley for the first time. This shot is from the Bird and Butterfly Garden at the Tijuana River Open Space Preserve. It is actually the only butterfly I saw there, but it was certainly worth the visit. I suspect in summer the Garden is full of interesting species.
Canon SX50HS in Program mode with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. – 1/3EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity and sharpness.
Bird of Paradise
One of the highlights of my trip to San Diego every year is the Bird of Paradise plants around the Marina Village conference center. Either the festival was a bit early this year or the flowers (not only BofP) were a bit late…but there were still some good specimens. I love the color contrast when the flower is fully open. It is so outrageous!
Canon SX50HS at 24mm macro equivalent, plus 1.5x digital tel-converter. f4 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
That Hummingbird Shot!
I got an unexpected gift on Thursday. I decided to go down to the other end of San Diego, to the Tijuana River Estuary, right along the US border, to see what I could see. The San Diego Birding Festival does field trips there every year, and the names of the places there: Dairy Mart Pond, Border Field Park, The Bird and Butterfly Garden, Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge and the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve come up in in any good description of the top birding places in San Diego County. And yet, in my 10 years of visiting San Diego for the Birding Festival, I had never been in the Tijuana Valley. Past time to do something about that. And besides, it seemed like the fresh water Dairy Mart Pond might be my best bet for early dragonflies. 
No dragonfiles, but I did find a lot of songbirds and raptors in the valley, some of which you will see here in due time. And then there were hummingbirds. Lots of hummingbirds almost everywhere I went in the valley. Mostly Anna’s in various stages of maturity. So the Tijuana River Valley itself was a gift, and I will certainly spend a morning there on future trips to San Diego…but of course it is this hummingbird shot that is the real gift! I believe it is a female Anna’s, by the chunky build and the location, but also by the sound it made in flight. Anna’s have a sharp, cracking energy to their flight that actually produces a unique sound that you can hear at close range. I was at the back end of the Bird and Butterfly Garden near the “Trail Staging Area” on the Tijuana River Open Space Preserve. This bird was in the red flowering bush for only 90 seconds total, visiting maybe a dozen flowers. I made several attempts to catch her at the flower. Most were empty frames…but this one! This one is the gift. This one made me smile out loud when I pulled it up on the LCD after the bird had flown off. When I got it up on the computer monitor that afternoon it gave me a little shiver.
It is not perfect. I would really like one like this with the gorget flashing in the sun, and the bird could be a touch higher in the fame. And, of course, there are lots of hummingbird shots like this one…and better than this one…with the bird at a flower. It is just that I have never taken one! Considering the difficulty of the shot, it still a wonderful gift!
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200 optical plus 1.5x digital tel-converter). f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Who knew? A macro.
Who knew a flower petal hid within the anther, folded as in a tiny furry coat of pollen? Who knew?
Probably lot of people actually. Botanists. Serious cultivators of flowers of all kinds. Maybe even observant gardeners. The point is, of course, that I did not. I had never looked closely enough, or perhaps, never caught the anther at just this stage of development.
This is my wife’s valentine lily, and I was using wide-angle macro (24mm equivalent, focus to 0 cm) plus the Digital Tel-converter function on my Canon SX50HS to get as close as I could. At 2x the DTC gives a 48mm equivalent field of view with better working distance and larger scale…and with an image like this that is “all detail” you loose very little quality. I might have gotten just a bit closer, but not without seriously getting in my own light. Already, on my HD 14 inch laptop display, the anther is 8 times life size.
Camera as above. f3.4 @ 1/30th @ ISO 200. Hand held (great IS on the SX50HS). Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. Processed in Lightroom for intnesity, clarity and sharpness.
My Valentine: a funny little story.
My Valentine and I took our daughter Kelia, and her sister, out for Indian as a late birthday present yesterday. On the way back we stopped at the local grocery giant, ostensibly for tea and bananas, but I had an ulterior motive. They have a good selection of flowering plants there at all times, and they would certainly, I was sure, have beefed it up for Valentine’s Day. And they had. This lovely lily is my Valentine’s Day gift to my Valentine. On the way out of the store she commented on how good the flowers smelled and stuck her nose in close enough to pick up a good smear of that very orange pollen. We laughed. When she got to the car and the rear-view mirror, she did a good job of smearing it over most of the tip of her nose, without removing any of it. Sticky stuff. “Engineered to stick to bees’ behinds”, as my daughter Kelia helpfully pointed out. At home it did come off with soap and water, so my Valentine is no longer branded, but if you see us together you will still, very likely, be able to tell she is mine. My Valentine.
And so the tale of a love is told, one funny little story at a time.
Canon SX50HS at 24mm equivalent and macro. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. f3.4 @ 1/20th @ ISO 800. A mix of pre-dawn window light and incandescent. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness (with some defocus and desaturation on the table cloth and the radiator in the corner to make the flower dominate).
And a very happy Valentine’s Day to you and your Valentine. May you have your own funny little story to roll out the tale of love.
Vegas Flowers
In typical Vegas fashion I can not tell if these are real blossoms or paper. This is a 30 foot “tree” that is part of the China themed display at the Palazzo. I suspect the flowers are fake but the make a brave show with their contrasting hanging lanterns.
This is a moderate tele shot to isolate the lantern buried in the flowers.
Canon SX50HS at 200mm equivalent field of view. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. f5.6 @ 1/20th @ ISO 1250. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Busy Bee: Seattle Washington
The small demonstration garden at the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle, the first week in October, was definitely in Northwest Autumn mode. There were actually a surprising number of flowers still in bloom. I am sure the layout of the sunny courtyard with its stone flagging and walls help create a kind of micro climate that prolongs the blooming season. And the bees were certainly taking advantage…busy putting up the last of the season’s pollen to be made into honey for the winter hive.
This telephoto macro was taken at 1800mm equivalent from about 5 feet…that is the full optical zoom of the new Canon SX50HS plus the 1.5x digital tel-converter function. The optical image stabilization of the SX50HS allows for this kind of hand-held extreme telephoto macro.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/160th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.