Objects in Gardens

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Hosta-like sculpture.

As I’ve mentioned before we’re members of our local garden club and every year the club has it’s garden tour. We visit a number of gardens around the lake and then end up for lunch at a fellow member’s house. I’ve posted about the 2014 garden tour before.

As usual I was less interested in the plants, shrubs, flowers etc. than I was with the various objects (sculptures, ornaments and the like).

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I knew there were such things as stone crabs, but this is ridiculous!

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Oriental Head.

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Japanese Garden Sculpture. Local legend has it that a previous occupant of the house discovered that her ashes could not be scattered on the lake and so decided to have them interred under this sculpture. I’ve have no idea if that is true.

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Flower Henge.

Neighborhood Dogs

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This dog lives about five minutes from where I do. There are actually three of them – the others can be seen in the background. He’s the brave one though. Whenever I pass with our dog, Harley they all charge down, yapping like crazy. However, they won’t go past a certain point – I assume because they have been trained using some kind of invisible fence. Lately I’ve taken to letting Harley go up their driveway to meet them. This is the only one of them willing to do so. He comes down to Harley and they wag tails and sniff at each other for a while. Then I continue with my walk leaving the other two looking disappointed. Maybe one of these days they’ll pluck up the courage to come closer too.

I’m actually quite pleased with this picture. It was a very bright day and in such conditions is almost impossible to see anything on the LED screen of the LX-3 so I was pretty much guessing as far as the composition went.

Water Droplets on a Leaf

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This was taken in June 2011 as I was walking in Teatown Reservation. It wasn’t that early, but the leaf was in a shady area and I suppose the dew had not been able to evaporate. I was really taken by the, what seemed to me, large number of of water droplets of different sizes. I particularly liked the contrast with the solitary red one – I wonder why just that one was red and none of the others.

Taken with a Panasonic Lumix LX-3. I was surprised at how blurred the background was. It’s quite hard to get such a blurred background with a small sensor camera such as the LX-3. I suppose close up and with a large aperture (here it was f2.0, as wide open as the LX-3 gets) is the only possibility.

Underware Vendor

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This was taken with a Pansonic Lumix LX-3 at a flea market in Connecticut in October, 2011. It was early (around 8:00 a.m.) in the morning and the sun was low and very bright. The light was extremely contrasty. At first I’d thought it would make a good color photo (the garments were brightly colored) but in the end I decided to go with black and white. Somehow the colors were a little too much “in your face”. The woman was aware that I was taking pictures, but it didn’t seem to bother her. In any case I didn’t stay around long enough to find out if she had a problem.

My first elephant ride

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My first, and so far only ride on an elephant – seen here in the ancient Thai capital of Ayutthya (you can see some of the ruins in the background). It’s not much of a picture, but I can take solace in the fact that I clearly didn’t take it (that’s me on the left in the picture). It must have been taken with my camera though, as I have the negative. For all it’s failings the picture is worth having to document an event that may never (and probably won’t) take place again.