May 2, 2011
It was back to the Myakka River State Park for Janet and me yesterday. There we walked a path along Clay Gully, a tributary of the Myakka River, which Jean had pointed out to me Thursday when she and I were in the park. Here’s a confession about the first photograph: I added more blue water on the left. I have said that I don’t manipulate the images I post online or mail out. I’ll amend my statement to “almost never.” I had tried different crops of the image and just couldn’t get the composition to sit right. I really wanted to include this image to show one of these little colonies that often build up around a jutting log in rivers—natural still life. What I did was to copy a portion along the left edge of the original image and paste it to the left of the left edge. I was lucky that the just-visible underground log cooperatively extended itself in a reasonable line as well. The second photo is saw palmetto leaves along the path. Clay Gully, like the Myakka, is very tannic, and the water over a dark river bed makes for vivid reflections, which you see in the third through sixth photographs. The orange spots in the third photo are where the sun poked through leaves and tannic water to light up white sand at the edge of the river. The yellow flower with the green bee is a coreopsis, the Florida state wildflower. About a dozen varieties of coreopsis are native here, and some are also called tickseed. I don’t know if this one is. The last photo shows a section of our path; the river is behind the foliage on the left.
Romancing Reality 