THIS Year Our Lawn Will be PERFECT!

 

Our lawn is looking really good this year!  THIS year our lawn will be PERFECT!  Haw, haw, haw, haw!  It always looks good at this time of year, but the minute the weather turns warm, it starts getting burned and by August half the lawn is brown!  Why, then, do I plant new grass seed every spring and water it and fertilize if it is just another fool's errand.  Because hope springs eternal.  "Maybe THIS will be the year that we have, not a perfect lawn, but a decent one."  The good news, and I should post a photograph of the lawn seen from the street - the grass is rich and thick and out lawn would qualify for a photo of it being on a package of Scott's grass seed!

Brilliant Venus Makes a Show

Tonight I went to an astronomy outreach event put on by another astronomy club.  I went because I have been asked to do a similar program in the fall, and I wanted to meet the students and see what and how the other club was going to present.  It was a nice evening, but because it was cloudy the whole program was indoors, for an hour and a half.  When the speaker was done, we had some refreshments and headed outdoors to discover the sky was mostly clear.  And there was a brilliant Venus in the dusk sky. What makes this photograph is the tree in the foreground.  I have no idea what kind of tree it is, but the silhouette of this particular tree against the sky is the most interesting thing in the photo, and Venus is frosting on the cake!

 

Even MORE Flowers...

I have been given an embarrassment of riches, with all the flowers and bushes in bloom at this time!  It sure beats overcast February and March days when I am really scrambling to find something interesting to photograph!  I bought a "macro" lens for the SONY a7 and it can focus so close that I can copy just a postage stamp and it will fill the frame!  Only thing is, when I get really close, the "depth of field" meaning how sharp the different parts of the image are from front to back, is not that great. So in extreme close ups parts of the image will be out of focus, as in this photograph of the Azalea blossom.  I still like this impressionistic image.

 

More Flower Photographs

Same place, almost but different time.  I take you back to my riding up my hill at the end of my bike ride.  Today I rode by the flowers I photographed the other day, but didn't like the image because it was in the contrasty light of the bright sun.  Today on the way up, I found a different garden, only 2 houses below us, and this garden was in the shade.  Look how much nicer it is when the garden is in soft light and you can see details and colors much better.  And what a beautiful garden design this is!

Joan thought the flowers I photographed the other day were possibly bluebells.  Perhaps these are as well, but just a different variety.  But I will let all of my readers tell me what I photographed THIS time!  Once again, in the soft light we can see so much more detail in each of the blossoms.  I still cannot imagine why I photographed those other flowers in the sun!  I know better than that!  Please, be SURE and click on each of these photographs - they are beautiful when enlarged!

 

A Beautiful Evening for Flying!

The CFI (Certified Flying Instructor) that I have been flying with since the beginning has taken some time off to get some training in a turboprop aircraft in hopes of flying for a charter aircraft company, which is a huge step up the ladder for a pilot hopefully on the way to an airline career!  So tonight I started with another instructor who I had done some ground school with, and who I really liked as well. Because this was a last minute switch, I could only get him from 5 PM until 8PM tonight.  But what a beautiful evening!  Climbing out from Mac Arthur Airport, as we approached Long Island Sound, I said to him: "Can you take the airplane, please?"  And he responded "Sure, are you OK?"  "Oh yeah, I just want to take some photographs!"  So this is the first one, with a hazy sun behind the clouds and reflecting off the water.

Only a short while later, this was the second scene worth photographing!  The bright sun became a hazy red ball because of the clouds and the evening haze.  How lucky could a photographer be to get both of these photographs on a single evening, from 2000 feet!  What an amazingly beautiful evening!

 

The Ferns Emerge

Every Spring I love to watch the ferns emerge.  First the little curled fiddleheads come up out of the leaves on the front hill then they start upward and unroll.  So I missed that part this year. But here a single fern makes its way up through all the other things growing on the front bank with the ferns.  Usually I shoot the ferns against the sky, but I love the feeling that this looks as if it is in a forest.  I used my 200mm telephoto lens so only the fern is sharp and the rest of the things are out of focus which I like.

 

A Flower Mystery

Ok, true confession here - EVERY flower is a mystery to me!  I was at the end of my bike ride, and heading up Laurel Avenue to home when I rode by these flowers on the side of the road.  Everything was completely green except for these blossoms and I really liked that.  I never have a camera with me on my rides, so I did this photograph with my iPhone.  I think maybe it looked better in person than it does in the photograph.  The problem is the high contrast from the bright sun.

Of course I have no idea what flowers these are, so I cropped into the large image so I can show you a close up of the blossoms.  And if you click on this image you will see even a closer view.  I would love to know what flower this is.  They are growing wild, but maybe they fame from someone's garden.