Milkweed

On the way home from our trip to Glacier N.P. and the Canadian Rockies, it so happened that we spent a night in Great Falls, Montana. Before we left the next morning, we stopped off to check out the Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail Interpretive Center — great displays, lots of hands-on stuff for the little one to play with. Oh, and all the landscape plants around the building are historically accurate — just what the Lewis & Clark expedition would have encountered on their way through.

Milkweed

Like these milkweed blossoms.

Sun on a cloudy day

Seen in front of the lodge in East Glacier, Montana:

Sun on a cloudy day

On our Glacier National Park trip, we drove out to East Glacier to check out the storied lodge there — and were fortunate enough to actually have sporadic sunlight for our visit.

OK, we had sporadic rain too. And sporadic 40 mph gusts of wind…

But with such good scenery, we were happy to deal with the occasional annoying weather.

Quill

If you like photographing flowers, and happen to travel to the big island of Hawaii, you really owe it to yourself to make some time to walk through the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden. Just a few minutes’ drive north of Hilo, it’s home to all sorts of beautiful tropical plants.

Here, for example, is a Pink Quill (tillandsia cyanea) bromeliad. It’s native to Ecuador, but apparently also available as a houseplant (although I doubt it’d do well for us here in Colorado):

Quill

More to come…

Still life with pinhole

So yesterday, April 25, was Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day — I thought I’d contribute a shot using my Lensbaby Composer and its pinhole / zone plate optic:

Still life with pinhole

This is a shot of some flowers on our dining room table — the exposure took forever (OK, 20 seconds) since the pinhole has an effective aperture of f/177. It also needed some serious noise filtering, since sensor artifacts really start showing up on long exposures like this. Still, I like the dreamy, abstract sort of look that it gives the shot.

Just for fun, I also used the zone plate (f/19) function of the optic on the same scene — far dreamier:

Zoneplate flowers

So which do you like better?

BTW, once it’s been reviewed by the powers-that-be, my pinhole submission will be on display as part of the WWPD 2010 gallery here.

Hanging out…

On the way back to our car from Boulder’s Pearl St. Mall, I happened to spot this little piece of yard decoration:

Hanging out...

The potted plant is long past being merely dead, so believe me — this looks much better in sepia.