Sunday, April 11, 2010

Spring Is Here

Early Spring Garden-2After several days in a row with temperatures way above normal, Mother Nature got a huge push to get plants going. It seemed like the daffodils came up in just a few days, everything greened up, and the flowering trees came into bloom. It's a beautiful time of year when the Winter greys disappear.

I made a trip over to Michele's garden -- my first visit in the Spring. It was a beautiful, sunny day. There were several types of daffodils in bloom. One is shown at right -- taking using a fill flash to get some light into the center of the flower. A fill flash also creates some shadows that give a bit of depth to the straight on view.

There were lots of flowering trees to look at too. The photo below shows a close-up of one of the blossoms.

Early Spring Garden-22

This is one of my favorite photos of tree blossoms.
Early Spring Garden-19

Busting OutThe subjects I found most interesting were the fiddlehead ferns that were just starting to emerge from the ground. Michele pointed them out -- otherwise I would have missed them. The photo at right shows them just as they stalks start to come out. When they get up a few inches, you can see a well developed structure even though they are only about the size of a $0.25 piece. The first photo below shows a macro view at an early stage. As they get a bit higher, a kind of red fuzz appears on the stalks and the head. The second photo below shows the fuzzy texture. In both cases I used a fill flash on the side away from the direct sun to get rid of the dark shadow.

Starting to Emerge

Fuzzy Fern

You can see all the photos from my visit in a Flickr set here.