The colors, foliage of spring

I've been remiss here for a good couple months. Photo shoots have been down, but busy work -- photo and otherwise -- have kept me away from the computer to compose for great lengths of time, which is required of a blog post of the sort that I usually offer here.

So, I'm once again in the position of playing catch up, and I begin today with something in my recent shoots that I really enjoyed, a recent leisure shoot of the spring flora and foliage in my gardens at home. These images were taken in two outings -- the initial, longer shoot using a Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro lens on a Canon 7D, the other no more than 10 minutes or so using my iPhone.

What you'll see here are tulips in my backyard circular and rear fence-line gardens, tulips, daffodils and frog figurines from my front yard garden; foliage from the perennials coming to life again; and even a closeup of a pair of dandelions.

Leading off the post is one of the iPhone pictures, a back-light composition taken just yesterday on a day when sunshine prevailed most of the day. Also an iPhone picture is the full circular garden and red bud tree perspective photo at the bottom of the post. The rest were taken with the 7D and macro lens two days earlier on a day when heavy clouds and splashes of rain were the day's weather in Central Indiana.

The first frog figurine you see below is from the front garden. This critter has lost a lot of its solid green color over the years, but the increasingly visible rust color seems to help it blend better with the crushed leaves and cedar-chip mulch. It reappears in a picture several frames below there, a perspective shot with the front garden tulips as a backdrop ... and juxtaposed as if the frog were guarding the bed. I did not pose the frogs for the shots; this was the position they were in when I started shooting.

The other frog figurine looks as if it is one with the daffodils, which date back to my first plantings in that garden, in 2004, the year I removed four monstrous yew bushes that concealed most of the porch from street view. The frogs joined the plantings a year or so later. There was a third frog, but it mysteriously vanished two years ago.

The orange tulips serve as the main attraction of my spring gardens in this, their fourth year, and now that the nearby red bud is flowering, the circular garden will be the focus for as long as the tulip petals last. Two purple tulip plants, new this year, were added as accents to each of the circular and front gardens.