Alpine Strawberries are blossoming in the warm spring sun. I take that as a sign that spring is here to stay. 🙂
Alpine Strawberry Blossoms in the Spring Sun
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The windflowers in the last post are wilting away, unfortunately before I had a chance to re-visit them. Instead, the bleeding heart flowers are in full bloom – such is the cycle of life.
The bleeding heart, also known as Venus’s car, Dutchman’s trousers, lyre flower or by their latin name lamprocapnos spectabilis is originally from Korea and north and western China, but it seems to do very well in almost any temperate climate, so it is a very popular garden plant.
We simply let it grow and cut the wilted stalks short in the fall and they come back year after year.
Bleeding Heart Flowers
In order to take the photo, I mounted the camera on a tripod and used an insane amount of extension (over 50 mm for a 70-200 mm lens). Despite an aperture of f/16, the depth of field is extremely shallow, about 2-3 mm in my estimate. That, combined with the light wind that moves the flowers like swings on a playground, made it challenging to get sharp images.
What really amazes me is how the lower white parts of the blossoms are textured. I had never noticed this with the real flowers before taking these pictures. Which just goes to show how photography can expand your awareness of the world. 🙂
The weather has finally turned sunny and warm, spring is definitely here. In fact, it’s almost warm enough to be early summer.
These beautiful white flowers grow in my garden under a rose bush. They are windflowers, also known as wood anemone, windflower, (European) thimbleweed, smell fox, or by their latin name anemone nemorosa.
White Windflowers
The flower is quite small (about 2 cm across), so I had to get very close using an extension ring between the lens and the camera. A tripod was required, of course. 😉
Last week we experienced some lovely fall weather. I was driving when the storm clouds parted to let the sun light up a rapeseed field. I stopped the car at the next safe opportunity and ran out with my camera before the light changed again.
It turned out that the weather stayed like this for a few minutes more than I anticipated and it was on the way back that I got the best images of the oak tree with the orange leaves in the bright yellow and green rapeseed field.
Oak Tree in a Rapeseed Field
Much to my chagrin, I was only carrying a JPEG-only tiny compact camera. This really shows at larger print sizes, but for online viewing it is a moot point.
Aside from the cliches that there is no substitute for the right light and that the best camera is the one you have at hand, there is another lesson that I draw from this experience:
Wear sturdy boots when you take a walk in the fields or spend an hour cleaning up your dress shoes. (Yes, it I did. ;-))
This calendula blossom opened up early in the morning, which is supposed to be a sign of good weather.
Calendula blossom with rain drops.
For some strange reason it started raining as I was taking the picture (you can see some rain drops). It is good that I found the information about the “sign of good weather” on wikipedia because that means it must be true. 🙂
