Blue Sky, New Green Leaves and the Sun

I have checkpoints where I record my times as I ride around my ten mile bicycle route.  This spot is one where I stop and record three times before continuing.  Today I looked up and of course saw the beautiful blue sky.  Then I saw the dark silhouettes of the large trees then the light green of the new leaves, with the sun shining through them.  Something so beautiful with all these things together.  It made my day special to see this.

 

Kathy's Doll

This is Kathy's doll which sits on top of a clock on the chest of drawers in the dining room.  She started making dolls for Vivian, and the earlier dolls were smaller than this one.  The origin of this one is interesting, we visited our friends Dick and Trauti in Rhode Island and Trauti had some dolls that Kathy admired, so she took a few photographs of them and use one of those photographs for making this doll.  She made one for Vivian first, and then decided she wanted one for herself, and this is the result. What is amazing is the hand stitching on the face, of the smile and the glasses.  She was really proud of how the stitching came out.  She is such a cute doll, isn't she?

 

Lilac Tree Blossom

I needed a blog photo today, and it was raining out.  But I saw these Lilac blossoms on the tree right next to the house in the back.  So I grabbed my SONY camera and got the old Leica lens which I had adapted for this camera, just to try something different that just a really sharp image.  I posted before about this lens being adapter and you can see that post Here.  This seems like an appropriate subject to use my old lens on, where only a small part of the whole image is in sharp focus.  I do love that it is Spring and every day we are seeing more things blooming.

 

Night Light

On April 10,  I photographed a single trailer illuminated by a spotlight late at night, which was located on the property of the old power plant.  When I got back home and pulled into the driveway I saw this scene.  Kathy had just finished with clients and she had left the back spotlight on which cast a shadow of the lilac tree on to the garage. I just thought that these shadows on the garage were so interesting.  Something just a bit different.

 

Fog in the Morning

When I get out of bed in the morning, I always walk into the front bedroom and look out at the street, and then look at the side yard.  It was foggy this morning and I thought I saw some possibilities out both the north window and the east window.  This is the east window, looking toward the rising sun, and I loved how the fog gave depth to the photograph because the fog separates the pine tree from the closer trees.  Not a great shot, but a little bit interesting, and atmospheric I think.

 

Off to London and Zurich

These are contrails over our house and they are "condensation trails" from the water vapor coming out the engines of high flying jet aircraft.  So of course many of us look up with a feeling of wanderlust, and wondering where airplanes like this might be going.  Well, now there is a simple answer.  It is an App (of course) for our cellphones.  It is called "Flight Radar 24" and you can get it for free.  I will leave out the technical stuff, like it receives  ADS-B transmissions from aircraft, showing where they are going, what their altitude is and how fast they are flying.  All on our phones

So there are two contrails over our house in the photograph.  I watched the first airplane fly over and looked it up on Flight Radar 24, and then when I saw the second airplane fly over I looked that up.  So here are the displays for both aircraft.  They are both flying at 33,000 feet and doing about 560 MPH.  If you look closely you can see the type of aircraft, one a 777 and the other 787 and you can even see what time they will arrive at their destinations!  What an amazing thing it is these days to be able to see where airplanes are going!

 

Hosta

I love watching the Hostas come out of the ground in the spring every year.  Little pointy things purple and green in color come out of the ground where the plant was from last year.  It seems to happen so quickly where the pointy things get taller and then they begin to both unwrap themselves, and continue to climb skyward.  There is something beautiful to see all these leaves unwrapping themselves as they continue to grow.  I photographed this early one morning and there are water drops on all the leaves. So this is a photograph of an early stage in the growth of this plant, so far.   Please click on this to see more detail.