Zooming - August 2014

I was in Texas for a couple of weeks so the zoom collages are for pictures I took while traveling rather than close to home.  The themes of the collages this month are: insects/reptiles,

plants, and

birds.

Watkins Glen State Park in the Spring

Watkins Glen State Park is a gorge with many waterfalls. The main entrance is at the bottom of the gorge but there is another at the top. Either way the gorge trail has stairs and wet stones/pavement. The last time we were there was in fall 2012 - when there was a lot of color from leaves. In the spring - there is a lot of green to contrast with the stone and quite a bit more water.

The gorge trail is a ledge. In one place it goes behind a waterfall.  There are frequently water droplets from overhanging rock. I was glad I had remembered to wear a hat. Waterproof shoes are good too if the day is cool (and wet feet would be uncomfortable). I made a slide show from my favorite gorge images from last week.

While my husband focused on his own photography projects - I managed to photograph a crow

A busy bumble bee

And a tiny fern unfurling its fiddleheads.

Zooming - May 2014

Spring is full of blooms.  The zoomed images from the past month include plum blossoms, dandelion flowers, a very wet tulip, and some hydrangea to add some blue…..

Maple samaras in the grass (detached before their time by browsing deer), cowslips, and jagged edge tulip….

A mushroom, a jack-in-the-pulpit, and a foraging chipmunk….

A foraging bumble bee, spores on the back of a fern frond, and the cone of a cycad….

Fiddleheads and a Venus fly trap….

The center of a dogwood flower, a peppermint color azalea, and new growth of pines.

I find that photographing makes me more observant while I am out and about….and then again when I am looking at the pictures on a larger screen once I get home. I often don’t realize the whole of what I am capturing in the field. Every zooming blog post I compile is a celebration of the technology available in modern cameras!

Fiddleheads in the Brookside Conservatory

I always look for ferns sending up their fiddleheads through the leaf mulch in the spring. They have not appeared outside in my part of Maryland…but there were some fiddleheads among the ferns in the Brookside Gardens conservatory.

The plant in the conservatory was a tree fern I have been checking every time I got to the conservatory. There were coils with coils….tight spirals that would uncurl into the fronds.