Obligatory spring flowers

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Daffodil.

My wife loves to grow flowers and spends enormous amounts of time and energy planting, pruning, fertilizing etc. My role in gardening is largely limited to lifting anything heavy and digging holes. I don’t much care for the gardening part, but I do like the flowers when they come out. This is particularly true in Spring. After the long Winter (and this year the Winter was particularly harsh) the bright, sunny flowers really cheer me up. Also I also like flowers because when I’m feeling lazy and don’t feel like going far I can usually find some flowers in our garden, and in other gardens along the road. So here are a few flowers, mostly from our garden – and there will be more to come in future posts.

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Rose

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I’ve no idea what this is, but I love the colors.

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Maybe not a host of golden daffodils but certainly a small cluster.

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Don’t really know what this is – some kind of bluebell?

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Don’t know what this is either

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Azalea – actually this one’s from a neighboring garden not ours.

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Still more daffodils

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White blossoms on a tree in our garden.

Magnolia Blossom

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On one of my walks around the lake I passed a number of magnolias. Unfortunately they were either past their best, or the blossoms were so high that I couldn’t get close enough to them. Then I saw this one. It was just the right height. It was a blustery day and the blossoms were blowing around quite a bit, but I was able to hold this one steady for long enough to get the shot.

Dam and Cascade

by Posted in Landscapes, Places Leave a comment
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Near the entrance to our lake is a small park, which the residents have started to call “Two bridges park” because of the two wooden bridges over small streams which pass through it. The garden club (including my wife) plants flowers there every year. In winter one of the fir trees is in the park is festooned with lights and becomes our Christmas Tree.

The park is also right next to the dam at the end of the lake. This dam features a valve to release water when the level of the lake is lowered and a spillway where excess water can run off the lake into a stream, which carries it away. We’ve had quite a lot of rain lately and so the water level in the lake is high – so high in fact that it’s spilling over the dam to form this cascade.

Master Glass Series from the Toronto Star

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In the newsgathering business, photographers must shoot in all types of lighting conditions, and often have only moments to capture the best possible shot. It requires skill and experience – and knowing photography and lenses like the back of your hand.

In “Master Glass” – Star photographers reveal how they do it: the settings, the angles, the lenses – the approach.

As of today (May 6) they are up to Episode 46 in the series. The video above gives an overview of the series.

via Master Glass | Toronto Star.

Another documentary: The Colourful Mr. Eggleston

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Fascinating. He seems to be another irascible character. I’m still not sure how much I like his work, although I must say that it seems to be growing on me. I could see that he deserves some credit for popularizing color photography, but at first his pictures seems to me to be too snapshot like. As I spend more time looking at them though I’m seeing something else: pictures of the mundane somehow brought to life. At little bit like the pictures by Eugene Atget. At first they just seem like ordinary pictures of buildings, parks etc. in old Paris, but as you look at them you realize that there’s more to it than that. I’ve tried to take pictures like Atget and I can’t. Although Eggleston’s pictures look like simple snapshots I suspect that I couldn’t take pictures like his either. I have a feeling that as I continue to look at this work I’ll get to like it more and more.

Eric Kim has an interesting take on Eggleston in 10 lessons William Eggleston taught me about street photography.