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May 10, 2020
The ponds in my community continue to fascinate me. You’ll probably see a lot of them before our lockdown is lifted. I’ll also keep checking out our groundskeeping area.
May 12, 2020 Update
Last night Robert Rodriguez critiqued the first photo on his Creative Critique-Live #6 event. If you want to see what he said about it and did to it, fast forward to 20:55 on the YouTube video. The whole video may be of interest to you other photographers who read this blog.
1 These feral apple trees were flowering at Green Pond.
2 A friend said this photograph made her think of a moon gate.
3 I was aiming for the ripples in the middle distance as they were lit by the sun setting over Meadow Pond, but the ripple in the foreground was an unanticipated gift.
4 My resident botanist tells me that many young leaves make their appearance as pink or red rather than green. The advantage is that light is less able to penetrate the tender young tissues until they have matured, by which time they will have developed their chlorophyll and turn green. There may be even more to it. I found the following on a web page of Northern Woodlands, a quarterly magazine published by the Center for Northern Woodlands Education, a nonprofit in Lyme, New Hampshire:
Scientists studying the physiology of fall foliage have suggested that the anthocyanins responsible for red color in leaves—in fall or spring—may help them withstand cold and screen them from damaging ultraviolet rays, air pollution, and various other assaults. This may not seem all that clever in an autumn leaf that’s about to drop, but in a spring leaf just getting started on a full growing season, it’s a brilliant strategy—especially considering all that could go wrong for a young leaf.
5 There’s one in every crowd, right? (And no, these wheelbarrows are not waiting to turn green.)
6 I also found a collection of traffic cones for my collection of traffic cones in our groundskeeping area.
7 The sun begins to set on Green Pond. The flowering tree in the background is the same tree seen in the foregound of the first photograph, taken in the morning a few days earlier.
Romancing Reality 