Here is the second of two galleries featuring my Baby Pete Lily of the Nile. The first gallery is here: Lily of the Nile (Baby Pete): Gallery 1 of 2.
This is a seriously cool plant. The resident Gardener and Photographer expects it will pose for another photoshoot soon, just for fun!
Thanks for looking!
Several times each week during the month of May, I took a series of photos of a lily that I added to my garden in April, as a way of chronicling its growth. It’s a variation of Lily of the Nile, a hardy plant that builds clusters of blooms on tall green stems, and so far has produced about a dozen such clusters since I got it. I don’t know why it’s called “Baby Pete” — but I assume someone somewhere had a good reason for that.
According to Wikipedia, a Lily of the Nile may live 75 years. Which means! When I’m in my 120s, I’ll still be taking pictures of this plant — by then most likely with my eyeball camera and macro contact lens, followed by post-processing with Adobe Lightroom sensors embedded in my fingers, then direct uploading from my networked brain stem. Good times!
No special notes to provide about how I processed these photos. I made use of radial filters as I described in Before and After: Yellow and Green (and Lightroom Radial Filters) then passed each one through Nik Collection’s Color Efex Pro, mostly to remove color cast and improve contrast. This first gallery shows the plant up to the point where the flowers were just starting to stretch open; in the next gallery, I’ll show the clusters in bloom.
I’m working on the companion piece to Before and After: Yellow and Green (and Lightroom Radial Filters) where I’ll write about how I used Lightroom’s mysterious Tone Curve panel, and add my contribution to the general confusion on the web about what this function actually does. I’m also working on 134 photos of the four kinds of Lantana in my garden, the images that I kept after culling about six hundred that I took of those plants.
134 photos! Argh! This may take some time….
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
Early this morning, I was out in the garden taking more pictures of plants I’ve already obsessively photographed, when this tiny lizard yelled at me from inside my Concord Grapevine and asked about doing a photoshoot. This was a very unusual thing: these lizards are often skittish around humans and typically scurry out of camera range, but this one wanted to hang with me and pose for a few shots. He said he was after a greater social media presence and for some reason thought I might be able to help.
He was a little shy about the camera at first (aren’t we all?) but quickly got into the swing of things and watched me, warily, as I moved around the vine, got closer and closer, and click-click-clicked. I was experimenting with an inexpensive (but very functionable) LED unit attached to my camera’s flash shoe, and his eyes kept following the light. He may have been a bit dazzled… you know: bright lights, big city, fifteen minutes of fame, and all that jazz….
Anyway… he stayed among the grapevine leaves for close to an hour and I took about fifty photos. He approved these nine for public release. Now he wants to be on Instagram….
This absolutely gorgeous barred owl has been a regular visitor to my back yard for nearly a decade, making its debut in the summer of 2008 as a youngster. The first time I saw it, it was perched on my Japanese Maple but quickly moved to the fence separating my property from my neighbor’s after getting flashed by the camera. For the first few years, it came back often, but these were the only photos I got until it was large enough and steadfast enough to remain mostly indifferent to my presence in its adopted garden.
Fast forward a few years and here’s what the owl looked like last summer. In all but two of these photos, it’s sitting on what’s become its favorite branch on the cypress trees behind my pond. Its downcast eyes — in the first two photos — are trained on the carp in the pond, and it will watch them for hours until I either shoo it away, or it manages (though it rarely does) to snag one of the fish (which are not intended as owl-snacks!) and fly off.
I haven’t seen it yet this year, but early in the evenings for the past couple of weeks, I’ve heard it — not too far away — as its very distinctive call is unmistakeable. Hearing the call again reminded me of these photos — a couple of which appeared here in 2018 when I first started blogging again and was re-learning how to use WordPress. I went through my archives and reprocessed these thirteen photos to share with this post. I think the last one’s my favorite, and, while I did use a zoom lens to get so close in, the owl was only about ten feet away: we’ve gotten used to each other, and it no longer soars off when I walk toward it with the camera. I expect I’ll get a chance to pose it in a new photo-shoot within the next few weeks.
Thanks for looking!
