Flowers

Signs of the end of the summer are everywhere, I'm afraid.

More fading summer flowers.

Detail from the Stonecrop photo I posted yesterday. From a distance the Sedum looks pink, but up close it's all reds and whites.

Eaton County, Michigan. A few weeks ago I posted a similar photo with a comment about photographer's luck; this is the photo I was attempting to take. For the record, I really like both.

One Sunflower . Here's that sunflower I've been watching, again. In the past week the leaves have grown a bit more ragged and have mostly turned yellow. Although the birds--the Jays and the Nuthatches, anyway--have begun eating from other sunflowers in our yard, so far they've been ignoring this one. But some day soon I expect I'll be showing you an upside-down Blue Jay....

Our front garden, well past its prime.

Spot on the trellis.

One Sunflower . My friend Kathie's been pesterin' me to make a collage of these photographs since early September. So here it is. I'd been planning to photograph this sunflower occasionally through the winter, but gravity got the best of it a couple nights ago so that won't be happening. I'm a bit sad about that, but it's not the only volunteer sunflower in the yard, so the birds will still have something to munch on when the weather turns bad.

This year's version of our Circle Garden wasn't really a success. A half-dozen Shasta Daisies just don't cut it, and the Dahlias I planted in May seemed pretty unenthusiastic about the location. Until mid-September, anyway. Finally they started growing. And blossoming.

I'm a bit under the weather today, so don't expect much from this corner....

I've been playing with DxO's OpticsPro photo processing software all afternoon. Thought I'd share a few examples. Both flower shots were from the same Daily Flower Census, which is what I call my habit of wandering the yard shooting pix. My processing objective in this case was to move the Nikon image toward a Sony color palette. The jury's still out on that, methinks.

I've been playing with DxO's OpticsPro photo processing software all afternoon. Thought I'd share a few examples. Both flower shots were from the same Daily Flower Census, which is what I call my habit of wandering the yard shooting pix. My processing objective in this case was to duplicate the processing I've been doing in Aftershot Pro. I'm able to do that, but it may not be the best approach.

Today's wintry Daily Flower Census found a Mallow blossoming and a couple Forsythia still bloomin'. But this done-in Dahlia was the prettiest flower in the yard.

I really intended to stop with the Quince pictures, but under the circumstances I couldn't resist.

Despite an insane amount of TLC from Joan, this plant's not doing well. The sparkles seem to result from the sunshine's backlight reflecting off the camera's internal prisms.