Shapes and Patterns at the Botanic Gardens

I was photographing the shapes of single leaves and the patterns of their rosettes of leaves and their symmetry when I came to this ?Aloe. The new leaves develop in a spiral pattern but with a 5 point shape in the centre.

Botanic Gardens Shallow Depth of Field

The Jade vine is in full flower at the moment and has such large hanging groups of flowers that the corridor is closed to prevent damage to the plant. I was using an Olympus legacy lens from my film days - most are taken at F1.8, all manually focused. My favourite is the Pitcher plant - here the lens was still missed up giving a real rain forest feel to the image.

Territorial Birds

Yellow Hammer, Whitethroat and Blackbird were singing at full volume on my morning walk today. The light was excellent, only problem was quite a strong wind which made handholding the lens difficult.

Yellow is the Colour

It seems almost overnight that our local views have become dominated by the yellow rape fields. Phone images only - must take a camera to record the fields on the next blue sky day; first five images from Sunday; last three today under grey skies.

Sunday is World Pinhole Day

Every year there is a day in April where pinhole camera users post an image so I thought I ought to prepare for it. Barry kindly lent me his Lensbaby composer which has a pinhole option. Here a selection from our local church. The last two are with the lensbaby with lens rather than pinhole

 

Toft Churchyard Focus on Bees

The first image is Andrena nitida, one of 13 species photographed this month in Toft Churchyard. It has a great range of vegetation with some areas mown regularly and therefore with lots of dandelions and daisies, other areas are cut back round graves but longer and other areas are left wild with alkanet, White Dead Nettle and lots of stinging nettle.