Red tulips finally show color;1st blooms from red bud seedling

The Flash Bus Tour and unplanned downtown Indianapolis reflections and patterns shoot Tuesday weren't the only photographic highlights of the day. When I returned home from those experiences, I was delighted to note that the red tulips in my fence-line garden had bloomed. The cool temperatures were keeping the petals close together; there wasn't an open-bloom show yet. But beams from a 6:15 p.m. sun hit the blooms at just the right angle to present some brilliant red hues.

The light orange tulips in my back circular garden look like they're a day or two away from opening. The same kind of light-orange tulips in the front garden may take a day or so more than that; they don't get the same amount of sunshine that the bulbs in the backyard get, so it normally takes them longer to show, so I'm not surprised about that.

These are shots of the red tulips from Tuesday evening. I'll be back with shots of them fully opened when that happens, presuming I can do so before a wicked storm comes through and shreds the petals.

And ... on top of the red tulips giving me their first show of color, Tuesday also proved to be the first day my now 3-year-old red bud tree, in the circular garden, has sprouted flowers and blooms. The conception of this tree is a first for me. For the past five years, I've spent a lot of time pulling countless seedlings of red bud that planted themselves helter-skelter after floating into my yard from my next door neighbor's red buds. Three years ago, I stopped short of pulling one particular seedling that was in the circular garden. Having been without backyard shade since losing a nice-sized tree to disease a good 10-12 years ago, I decided to leave that seedling alone and see how it would fare, leaving it to nature to decide whether it lived or died. It's withstood a lot, and seems very strong. It's now taller than me, too, so ... barring any unforeseen health hazards, it appears it's here to stay.

I like the fact that the red bud, in a way, reconnects me to the early years of my career in journalism -- and photography. Not long after graduating college, I edited a weekly newspaper in Columbus, Wis., which calls itself the Red Bud City. I was there for only one spring, but I remember the beautiful array of red buds lining Dickison Boulevard in that town. Even though I took most of the pictures for the Columbus Journal-Republican (now just the Journal), paper then, I wasn't nearly the photo fanatic I am now, so I didn't take any images of those red buds.

 

The show in the sky

While still working on editing more than a thousand images taken Saturday at the Miracle Mile Parade in Indianapolis, I decided to dedicate a post to some things in the sky that caught my attention during the parade. All of these were taken with a 70-200mm lens equipped with a 1.4x extender at its maximum focal range (so 280mm).

The commercial airplane -- well, I suppose it might not have been that big a deal except for the craft's bright red underbelly. Even when I first spied it (picture below), it was impressive, but then it turned slightly and caught the sunlight in such a way that it lit up the craft's underbelly (top), and that's when I did my audible "oooooo" while the shutter clicked away.





The balloon -- there must have been a dozen balloons -- all yellow -- that I saw released (whether accidentally or on purpose) from the spectator contingent at various points during the parade. I wasn't lucky enough to capture its marking except for the one occasion you see pictured above. Otherwise, the "faces" on all my images of skyward balloons from Saturday are a bright, solid yellow (below).






The party streamers -- well, the festive occasion was open for stuff like this to be thrown about. Some floated skyward unobstructed (above); unfortunately, some did not, and ended up caught in the telehpone poles and wiring (below).




Send in the clouds -- I guess the cloud formation below isn't that spectacular, but it did strike me as interesting ... and besides, I wanted another sky image for this post! I played the "guess what it look like" game when I pulled it up on my screen at home afterward.



An interesting thing about these sky images, at least to me, is that I was able to snag that rich blue color in most of them without benefit of a polarizing filter (which I usually turn to when this is actually an objective). I also did very, very little tweaking of saturation in post-processing.

It was that beautiful of a day.

A tomato for the ages?

This is a still life of something I picked off the vine of a beefeater tomato plant in my yard the other day. I tried to explain this to someone in an email yesterday, and had trouble doing so. I finally said, "You have to see it to appreciate it!"

Which is what put the idea in my head to capture this as a still life. This is, indeed, one fruit -- a sort of siamese twins (triplets?) thing with two parts smaller than the third, and one part yellow, two parts red.

This fruit measured 15 inches at its maximum girth, in case you're wondering about perspective. I used window light from camera right and the angle was slightly left of center.

I haven't consumed this fruit just yet; it's hard for me to do it!