The Cormorant, the Dragonfly, and the Bee: cherries

Showing posts with label cherries. Show all posts

Friday, August 26, 2022

Park Places

Here are a few selected photos from the Arnold Arboretum, Mass Audubon's Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary, and one from the park otherwise known as our front yard.

This first one is taken at Arnold Arboretum. This was a *huge* tree that had a full canopy of leaves and branches which came to the ground all around. One could "enter" between the leaves and look up, which I did for this shot.

Leaves Above

My son and I visited Mass Audubon's Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary and saw several Red-winged Blackbirds. Here's a male:

Tongue Tied

This photo below is of a female Red-winged Blackbird. They look completely different from the males; it was much easier to identify this bird after seeing all the other (male) Red-winged Blackbirds in the area.

Bird Alert

Surface Bloom

I took this next photo of a robin while sitting on our front step. We have a cherry tree in our front yard that birds totally love in June when the cherries appear. Sometimes the birds get so "drunk" on cherries they run into our windows when flying away. We're always alarmed when we hear the thud of bird against a window. Thankfully, they usually survive the encounter.

Eyeing Cherries

Saturday, July 1, 2017

Life is a Tree Full of Cherries

By some wonderful quirk of fate, we happen to have the most enjoyable cherry tree in our very own front yard. Not only is it pleasing to behold, it serves up massive amounts of delicious tart cherries this time of year.

Photographing the tree and its cherries is an annual challenge of mine. While prior years have yielded some okay photos, I've not been overly pleased with the results. This year, I chose to make an extra effort to see if I can display the cherries in a way which really shows off their "cherriness." You be the judge, but I think at last I've succeeded.

Note that the cherries are not quite fully ripe in these photos, and that is why their color leans toward orange, rather than true red. Even in the two days or so since these photos were taken prior to this post, they have turned just a bit more red, and less orange. I think the deep orange color shown here gives them a kind of translucency in the sun and gives them more "pop."

Take a look. They are as yummy as they appear. Go nature!

Portal to Cherries

Sun Drenched Cherries

Cherries Up Close and Personal

Cherry Burst in the Sky

Semi-hidden Cherries

Sky-backed Cherries

Cherries Coming At You

Points of light becoming round diffuse blobs is sometimes referred to as "bokeh" in a photograph. This is a side effect of the background of the image being beyond the current depth of field (area of the picture which is in focus.) The quality of an image's bokeh refers to the smoothness or harshness of the out of focus background blur. It doesn't need to contain smooth round blobs, but if there are any bright lit areas in the background, that is how good "bokeh" typically makes them look. Often this renders photos more pleasing to the eye, and is usually preferred to having everything in sharp focus. However, having the entire frame in focus can be perfectly desired for, say, a wide landscape/scenery shot.

I don't really know who's reading this blog, so I occasionally describe such nerdy photography details as this. If you already know about "bokeh", or don't really care, and just want to look at the pictures, my apologies for the interruption:) After checking out the overall image, look at the bokeh in this next photo.

Dancing Cherries

Cherries Above

Monday, July 13, 2015

Moving Water Drops

I've got some water drop pictures that having nothing to do with morning dew after a rainstorm like the last post.

Unknown Dog Shaking Water Off Doesn't Look So Friendly

This Horse Loved to Splash in the Water

Here's a picture of my smiling spouse doing one of the things she loves best: picking really local and organic food. If you look closely, you can see the movement of the rain drops.

Deb Picking Some Cherries From our Very Productive Cherry Tree

This one is interesting in that I wanted to freeze the sprinkler spray so I could see the water drops, but it was very late in the day and it was getting dark. This is the "out of the camera" jpeg:

Out of Camera JPG

Not too useful, right? This was shot with my Olympus EM-5 MkII with 12-40 lens at 1/2000 sec.

While I shoot mostly raw files now, this happened to be a jpeg only image. Could I save it, even though it's a jpeg? What do you think?

Neighbor's Sprinkler in Action

It is amazing the amount of image information that is buried in the shadows, even in a jpeg.

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Afternoon Variety

After walking around the Res. and frustratingly taking no pictures because nothing seemed photo worthy, I returned home and took all these pictures from afternoon through late late afternoon.

All pictures in this post taken with my Olympus 75-300mm lens. For non-photographers, this is a telephoto zoom lens, not a macro lens; so I had to stand a short distance away to take the closeups. All handheld. All pictures are uploaded with a max dimension of 1000px.