Bradford Pear Blooms

These are the blooms from a Bradford Pear tree in my neighbor's yard. This particular bloom had 4 or 5 flowers on it and was no larger in diameter than a silver dollar coin. Each individual flower is about the size of a U.S. nickel.

Below is a magnified version of one of the flowers to show the stamens up close. These are hand held shots and are also uncropped.

Wednesday

I've been bouncing back and forth recently between playing Limit Hold 'Em (LHE), Full-Ring No Limit Hold 'Em (NLHE), and 6-max NLHE and seem to be losing focus. I like all three games, as they each have their own merit, but by playing all three I'm seeing a lot of variance now. I think I need to pick one and stick with it and hopefully it'll be soon. I've been talking to NeonBlack about this and he's given me some good advice on Full-ring if I decide to go back to that game, so thanks for that, Neon. Good luck on the felt and may the good cards hit your hand.

Yesterday My daughter was excited to pick the first flower from the phlox plant on our deck and I wanted to get some shots of it with the Raynox lens before it wilted. This is a sign that warmer days will reamin constant, since this perrennial is usually the first to bloom down here. The first shot is kind of close up to show scale. That is whodat's thumb in the top left of the frame. These are all full framed, uncropped shots.

This second one is shot with full 4x optical zoom and 12x digital zoom to get closer.

The third one is taken with 21x digital zoom. The Canon S3IS is capable of 48x digital zoom, but this photographer isn't steady enough to get a good shot. Yet. Hope you enjoy these and leave a comment if you like.

Macro Monday

So I'm playing fetch the ball with my Golden Retriever to wear her butt out and I spy this weed coming up in the lawn. The flowers looked pretty cool so I thought I'd give it a look through my Raynox lens to get up close. This lens allows you to really get inside the subject, almost like having a microscope. The flower you see below is slightly larger than a grain of rice, so imagine how small the bug is that's sitting on the top here. This is a full frame, hand held shot using the magnification (21x) from my Canon S3 IS.

As always, you can click on the thumbnail for a larger image. Comments welcome.