I enjoyed traveling over the past month and many of the places provided ample opportunity for some close photography. Some highlights in this set of zoomed images are:
Enjoy!
Kenilworth Park & Aquatic Gardens are full of lotuses in bloom this time of year….and dragonflies and waterlilies. We made our first day trip to the place last week on the first sunny day after a huge rain storm. Some of the grassy paths between the ponds were flooded but the circuit wide path was passable. We’ll go again before the end of season.
Eventually I’ll get better at recognizing the different dragonflies. The Blue Dashers are the only ones I recognize easily (the ones that look like they’ve been dusted with light blue powder).
The surprise this year was pots of red hibiscus near the visitor center. I wonder if I somehow missed them last year.
Enjoy the Kenilworth Gardens via the slideshow below!
The small animals on or near plants are sometimes the challenge I choose for photography. The walk around Brookside Gardens resulted in a few worth sharing:
The spider on the yucca flower
A damselfly that must have been tired since it stayed put for such a long time. It is an ebony jewelwing!
A mourning dove enjoying the summer sunshine in the garden
Bees at the hollyhocks. I always associate hollyhocks with a great aunt’s house. She always had them planted around the side steps to her house.
A bee on a hydrangea. Brookside has quite a variety of hydrangeas these days and this type seemed the most popular with the bees the day I was there.
May is always an excellent month for outdoor photography. I had no trouble at all finding a lot of zoomed images to create the collages below. Can you find the
There was a dragonfly in a petri dish to be looked at under the microscope at one of the demonstration tables of the Belmont BioBlitz. I took a picture with my camera in ‘close up’ mode - without the microscope; the magnification is enough to make it interesting but I need to have better control of the light source to avoid reflections.
Even though butterflies are more generally colorful - I find the dragonflies more interesting. It is just getting warm enough to see them this season and observe their behavior: diving through the meadow and sitting on the tip of meadow grasses. Later we’ll see them near water on lotuses or water lilies and stroking over the water to lay their eggs. May camera speed is not fast enough to catch the two wings on each side moving independently.
The wing structure seen in the photograph could be a Zentangle. Are the lines veins or just structural elements?
Next time I go to Arizona, I’ll photograph my son-in-laws mounted collection of spiders and insects!
Celebrating the whole of life....
Thanks for visiting my blog! Enjoy the photo picks from 2023:
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