There is a lot of Northern Hemisphere Christmas imagery in this month’s zooming series. It is the time of year that we bring green indoors for decorating - to contrast with the view from most of our windows of bare tree branches. We notice the subtle changes in color and texture now that the leaves are brown mulch on the forest floor - raked away from the lawn.
Enjoy the zoomed images…and take a closer look at decorating in your area too!
The theme for the November zooming post is fall color and texture. The burst of colors - greens, reds, yellows, oranges - is the finale of the growing season. They are fading fast in our area by the last weeks of November. The leaves crackle as they dry, their color fades to brown or black as they decay to mulch.
The seeds of many plants are surrounded by fluff (milkweed, cattails, and blazing stars) that acts as a parachute for the fall breezes to carry them away from their parent toward a place they can sprout next spring.
Most of my zooming collages are of plants and animals. This month my focus is external architecture and ornamentation. The images show form, repairs, corrosion, and patina of age. Materials are quite varied: stone, paint, plaster/cement, copper, bronze, wrought iron, cedar shingles, and glass. Enjoy the show!
Late summer and early fall is a time of transition…lots of changes to capture in photos. There are seed pods
And seeds.
Insects going about the business of feeding,
Mating and growing large enough to move to the phase of their life to overwinter.
The birds are through their nesting and getting ready for migration. There was a bright yellow mold that emerged from a knot in our deck railing after a rain.
And - last but not least in this collection of zoomed images - the bright colors of flowers and chard stems.
I was in Texas for a couple of weeks so the zoom collages are for pictures I took while traveling rather than close to home. The themes of the collages this month are: insects/reptiles,
plants, and
birds.
We are in the full swing of summer - lotus and water lilies - summer wild flowers and fireworks. Those are major themes for the zoom collages this month.
The first collage is of lotus at the Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens.
The water lilies are also from Kenilworth.
The squiggles from botched firework pictures actually turned out to be worth a collage too.
Last, but not least, a zooming collage from my walk around the Howard County Conservancy Honor Garden.
Spring is full of blooms. The zoomed images from the past month include plum blossoms, dandelion flowers, a very wet tulip, and some hydrangea to add some blue…..
Maple samaras in the grass (detached before their time by browsing deer), cowslips, and jagged edge tulip….
A mushroom, a jack-in-the-pulpit, and a foraging chipmunk….
A foraging bumble bee, spores on the back of a fern frond, and the cone of a cycad….
Fiddleheads and a Venus fly trap….
The center of a dogwood flower, a peppermint color azalea, and new growth of pines.
I find that photographing makes me more observant while I am out and about….and then again when I am looking at the pictures on a larger screen once I get home. I often don’t realize the whole of what I am capturing in the field. Every zooming blog post I compile is a celebration of the technology available in modern cameras!
There were so many pictures taken in the last month to look at….to crop for this month’s ‘zooming’ post. I finally chose some favorites: a degraded shell spiral, water droplets on leaves, uncurling leaves, crocus, hyacinths, violets, tulips, daffodils, hibiscus, deciduous magnolia, the profile of a sculpture. Enjoy the views!
The ‘zooming’ post for January includes botanicals from outside (curly bark, magnolia leaves, leaves and twigs of a bush under ice and snow, a deteriorating shelf fungus) and inside (hydrangea, Christmas cactus, Norfolk pine, lilies, amaryllis) plus a pitted shell in the rock garden and the fringe of a holiday tunic. 
Celebrating the whole of life....
Thanks for visiting my blog! Enjoy the photo picks from 2023:
Copyright © 2024, Gwen Morrison. All rights reserved.
Powered by Squarespace.
