Never saw a purple rose before…
On our recent visit to California, I spent a couple of hours at the Oakland Bonsai Garden taking pictures. Since photography is a new pursuit, I find it easier to take pictures of objects because they stay put. The enclosed Bonsai Garden closed minutes before I arrived, but there were some lovely flowers in the adjacent community garden facility. I used the photo editing program that came on my computer to create the blurred background in the photo below. My semantics are probably all wrong, but I don’t know photospeak.
I’d never seen one of these before, either…
I have been playing with foreground and background focus. I took a bunch of photos with different aperture settings, and I couldn’t tell any difference between them, but I had luck just taking the camera and putting it very close to the foreground objects to create some parts that were out of focus, some that were in.
Yellow flowers, white bucket.
I wandered across some ducks in a pond, so I played with shutter speed to capture motion. These ducks were fun to shoot, although I didn’t capture motion the way I envisioned. Gotta start somewhere.
This shy fellow swam away from me, fast.
His gregarious older siblings.
Taking photos has made me notice much more than I have in the past. I might need to learn to balance viewing life through the lens with actually being in the scene. I say this because I took approximately five million pictures on the California trip. That’s a topic for another blog. For now, I hope you are having a happy Saturday.
Something else I’d never seen.
thepauser 
What an enjoyable tour of this beautiful garden! Love these flower photos, and ducks are so cute. 🙂
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Thanks. I have fun trying.
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well done! 🙂
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Hey, Joni, welcome to the picture taking world. Gosh, if these are your first efforts, it’s going to be wonderful to see what you consider perfected. I especially like the poignancy of the fading blue flower. I just got a new camera – and while it’s a Nikon, it’s a dummy’s version – still point and shoot, but a big upgrade in zoom and lens power. I only took 500 pix of Acadia Nat’l Park which I bravely whittled down to 325. Lol. Keep up the good work.
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Thanks, Jan. I thought some of your pictures of Acadia were fantastic, too. I especially liked the little frog!
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Love those purple roses!
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Me too! I didn’t even know roses came in that shade.
j
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Lovely pics, I think those last ones are African, we call them Red Hot Pokers here in Australia.
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Thanks for telling me what they are! I’m a lot more interested in common than botanical names. Thanks so much for the read and for the follow.
j
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Oh yes, there is so much more of a story in the common names of plants; here in Western Australia we have a similar climate to sub-Saharan Africa and so we have a lot of plants (that grow well) from that region of the world, unfortunately too well sometimes (just ask me about Plumbago 😦 ).
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We have plumbago here (South Texas), but it doesn’t overrun our gardens.
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