Chicago Flower and Garden Show - 3.06.11 - Post 3/3

So this is my last post on the flower show.  Just a few more shots I thought were interesting but didn't fit into my other themes.

The Geometry of Plants

 Fun with macros/Annoyance with macros.  I really wanted to get both of these cactus 'fingers' in focus, but my camera was having none of it.  Even on manual-focus.  I could get one or the other, but not both.  This may have had to do with the limited options I have for focal length when shooting in macro.  I also wonder if I had known then what I learned last week about spot-metering if I could have gotten them to both look better. As you can see, despite being two parts of one plant, the lighting on each was different.  That was how bad the lighting was at this place.  All that said, there are some very cool aspects of this shot.  Look at the piece in focus.  I love the geometric pattern the spines make as your eyes travel from the far left edge up the cactus.  There's hexagons and triangles and rhombi.  I love it.  This is when macro photography is fun.

Jewelweed in Ruby and Emerald

These jewelweed leaves were gorgeous but I'm learning that Red is Hard.  On my LCD screen, on my computer screen... red is hard to reproduce.  This is as close as I could get, and my mind's eye still tells me it's not saturated enough, but when I try to turn up the saturation, even a little, the red becomes magenta and that's not right either.

Arctur African Attempts to Stretch

 My awesome little daisies again.  These are African daisies and I find it amazing how many varieties of African daisies there are out there - all of these have white petals and purple centers.  My best guess, given the pointed petals is that this is an Arctur African Daisy.  But if someone out there is a better horticulturist, feel free to correct me.

Pretty, Purple and a Total Mystery.

I have no earthly clue what these are, but they're really pretty.  Like I said in an earlier post, very few flowers in the show beds were actually labeled.  And because these are cultured flowers, I can't even use my normal tricks of looking for websites that feature the wildflowers of a given area and then look at everything in the 'purple' category.  I can't even use the identifier programs because they want things like native location and when they bloom.  Guess what?  Who knows?  It was an indoor show where the flowers were forced, so... *shrug*  If you've got an idea, please holler!

Shades of Blue

These are blue hyacinth.  The blue can be seen best where the flower attaches to the stem.  They're bulb flowers like tulips and daffodils, but have many flowers on a stalk, which always makes me think they're something else.

On First Reflection

And, of course, my (sort of) first water lily of the year.  Water lilies are one of my favorite flowers.  I only count this as 'sort of' because it's in a garden show.  But I suspect that when I start getting out the the Lincoln Park Lily Pond in the next month or so or the Botanical Garden when the tulips start coming up, I'll start finding some that are working their natural cycle.




Okay, that's it for that show.  Last week I was in Nashville, Tennessee and we took my 15 month old nephew to the zoo.  Nashville, like most other zoos, has some brilliant set-ups for some of their animals - like the outdoor meerkat exhibit with a cluster of babies! - and some that are just awful and unshootable - like the red panda who spent most of her time pressed up against the corner of the glass grooming.  Those shots and a discussion of metering coming soon!

Chicago Flower and Garden Show - 3.06.11 - Post 1

So I got another press pass to an event at Navy Pier.  Well, not actually a press pass, more like a press sticker.

I think I could have done this on my computer.

Yes, that's a picture of my knee.  They handed me the sticker with no backing and I got the definite impression that it wouldn't stick again if I moved it.  I've never been a fan of having nametags/labels on my shirt and I knew I'd be aggravating it (and it would be aggravating me) all day if it was up near my camera strap.  So it went on my jeans.

I'm glad I didn't pay to get in, because it wasn't a great event.  Now, having said that, I suspect if you're actually there to get ideas for landscaping it may have been just fine.  But as a photography event it was very, very poorly designed.  And there were an insane number of photographers around.  Not just "Oh, I should get a picture of this container garden so I can do something like it at home" photographers.  I don't think I've seen so many fully kitted-out dSLR photographers in one place since... well, possibly ever.  Lots of people who, like me, weren't afraid to get on the floor to shoot at a better angle or spend the time monkeying with lenses and tripods and filters and all the stuff that goes with them.

And yet... this was a photographer's nightmare in a lot of ways.  There were two ends of this large exhibit hall.  For reasons I don't understand at all, the end that had all the display gardens and the show plants contest was horribly, horribly underlit.  The bulbs appeared to be incandescent, but my white balance was being completely thrown off by them.  "Auto WB" wasn't working and in various places throughout the hall I had to change to different settings.  I have no idea how they could make the temperature of the light so radically different in about twenty feet, but they were managing.  The other end, where they had the vendors?  Very brightly lit.  Go figure.  The only good thing about this lighting was that there wasn't enough of it to make harsh shadows a concern.

To give you an idea, though not the point of this shot, you can see how much brighter the hallway was.  That bright spot behind the tree on the right hand side is the entrance/exit to the exhibit hall.  Look how much brighter the hall is than the lighting on the bench and 'plants'.

Due to the low lighting I had to spend a lot of time putting the camera on the tripod and bringing the apature down to about 22 or smaller (I played with 45 in some areas) and run a crazy long shutter to get a reasonable shot.  Having just gotten my camera cleaned (more about that later) I wanted to keep my ISO at 100 as often as possible, so I decided to take the time getting the long exposure shots.  Which can be pretty flipping difficult when there are a lot of people milling about in non-intuitive paths.  I think I've decided that I need to start going to some of these events armed with a stack of postcards or flyers that explain to people a little bit of photography etiquette.  Things like, if you hear the shutter click once, but not the second time, the photographer is taking a long shot.  DON'T WALK IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA!  An exceptionally long exposure is thirty seconds.  Unless you're chasing your errant toddler or you are on fire, thirty seconds is not that long for you to hold it for just a bit.  Most photographers try very hard not to set up in obtrusive places or where their tripod will be a trip-hazard.  Please show them the same consideration by waiting to go past their lens.  Oy.  I know there are always people who don't realize they're walking into your shot, but this place seemed to have an inordinate number of people who would walk through going, "Oh gee are you shooting?  Sorry."  Or one person in their party would stop and wait and someone else would say to them, "Oh, it's fine, you can go past, she isn't shooting," without asking if it was actually okay for them to go past or if I was shooting.

The show had a few other problems that were more relative to how the show is billed and promoted around Chicago vs. what you actually get...  The show is all over every local news channel.  They run the free Navy Pier trolleys for the event, even though they're generally shut down in the winter.  It's made out to be a Very Big Deal. And some of it is obviously very cool.  There were some really interesting garden and patio/porch displays by people from all over the country.  But then there were some really odd things too...

Between the show gardens and the vendors' area there are these 'rooms' set up by various sponsors. 

 

This is clearly a picnic set up done by a local community college's level two floral design class.  I've never done anything like this, but this doesn't look like a level two of much of anything.  Honestly, it reminded me more of "Quick Fire" challenge for an art Reality Show. (I can't think of the name of the one Bravo did last year, but it seemed like to should come from there.)  "You have 3000 carnations and a budget of $50 at Michaels.  Make a 'room' from this in the sixty-seven mintues."  It just screamed amateur to me.  Sticking red carnations in hot dog buns to make flower hot dogs?  I don't even know what the orange ones in blue bowls were supposed to be.  Or why there's construction fencing hanging from the walls.

Like I said, it may be harder than I think it is; I've never done it, but I was very very underwhelmed to see something like this at an event that is theoretically this Big of a Deal.

Another huge annoyance for me is that at best, 25% of the plants being used were labeled.  You would think that at a show where you're supposed to be giving people ideas, you might want to let them know what it is they were looking at.  And very few of the gardens had people attending them to tell you if you wanted to know.

Oh, and that picture above with the bench and the orange and yellow painted trees?  I have no earthly idea why they would bring those to a show that is primarily about living plants.  They're supposed to represent a park along Lake Shore Drive near Lincoln Park Zoo.  A number of trees down there died a few years back and for some truly incomprehensible reason, instead of removing them, the park district decided to paint them orange and yellow and a few green and blue.  We're living in a budget crisis in this city, but they somehow had the materials and the people to go paint dead trees.  I do. not. understand, but there it is.  And why would you want to showcase that at a flower and garden show?

Anyway, I got a lot of shots that will actually make for some great teaching moments.  I always wanted this to be a place where we could discuss technique and methods, but it's mostly been, "Look!  I took a picture of a thing!"  I've been reading a 'bookazine', as they call it, and they're breaking down both the basic and more specific concepts in photography and it's been helping me a lot.

So, while showing off the pictures I took (because, hey, I need to do that too. :) I want to talk about some basic concepts that new photographers might not be overly familiar with or that more seasoned folks haven't thought about.

To wit, I'll be posting on:
• ISO, so what?
• White balance: what color is your environmental light?
• You probably bathe your dog more often than you clean your camera.  You may want to do something about that.

But before I go... just a few of the good shots that I was pretty pleased with.

Another Anther

As you may have noticed, now that the snow's gone, I needed to change my banner photo at the top of the blog.  I'm going to do an entire post on the tulips - the huge tulip garden was one of the few places they did everything pretty much right.  This was my favorite shot from the entire day.  It looks great even at full size.  The peach and yellow make a really pretty background and the three brown anthers give the shot a great focal point.  For anyone keeping score at home this was taken at ISO 100, F36 and a shutter speed of 13 seconds.  I also used a two second timer to trip the shutter so I wouldn't bump the camera by pressing the button.  I did no post production edition of this, not even cropping (obviously it was scaled), but it came out of the camera like this, and I was pretty excited.

Wouldn't Look out of Place on Canvas

I've never been a huge fan of those old school nineteenth century oil paintings that are all in dark greens and browns with a little yellow or dark red in them.  And yet, these roses would fit in perfectly in one of those shots and I love them.

A Rose of Fire

Here's that top, center one blown up.  I don't know what they were called, but the colors make me think of what would happen if you made a rose out of fire.

Standing Out

This was in a windowbox display that actually had a key put up on the wall so I can go and look to see what it is, but I haven't checked yet.  I'm fairly sure it's some kind of daisy.  I did a metric ton of color-correction on this shot and I'm still not 100% thrilled with it.  But at least it's not pink any more.  These are really awesome flowers with bright purple centers and white petals with light green edges.  My favorite color combination ever.  I also like that I played with the aperture setting enough that I got the background to be just fuzzy enough that the flower stands out, but not so fuzzy that you can't tell what is behind the focus.

Okay, the next post will actually be a discussion of white balance and why it's worth fighting with. :)

Matthiessen State Park - 9.25.10 - Post 1/2

In a little, tiny town called Utica, Illinois, there are two state parks.  One is the very well known Starved Rock, the other is Matthiessen State Park.  A group I belong to had a trip to Matthiessen planned, so I figured it would be a great chance to go shoot a site that's over two hours away and not have to make that drive on my own.

Which... worked up to a point.  I didn't have to make the drive on my own, but I remembered what happened the last time I had this thought (go with the group so I'm not out in BFE on my own)... I get highly annoyed at how fast everyone moves; I really do better when I go shooting on my own or with another photographer who understands 'move slowly and quietly'.  I mentioned something to the group leader about not wanting to sprint through the park, and she said we wouldn't be, but um... yeah we were.  And I don't mean that even from a photographer's standpoint.  Even if I'd left my camera in my car, I'd feel this group was trying to make land speed records.

Nevermind the fact that I was actually trying to take a few pictures.

Not helping at all is that this is a split-level park - there's an upper dells and lower dells section, which means there's a lot of stairs.  It's not like you go down, stay down and then come up and stay up.  You're up and down all over the place.  At one point we did 148 stairs consecutively (according to the signage).  That's roughly the same as going up (yeah, this was 148 stairs UP) 14 floors of a tall building.  Did I mention that my asthma deals with hiking across all kinds of land, but really, really hates doing stairs?  Ugh.

Overall, for this time of year and for a Saturday and for the the kind of photography I do, I'd give this park a D.  It's very, very busy.  Which means there are no animals anywhere you can see.  I heard some birds - I'm quite sure one was an owl - but other than the occasional blur streaking across the sky, I didn't see one animal.  We're also just far enough into fall to be at that awkward place where the interesting flowering plants are pretty well gone, but the really spectacular leaves haven't come in yet.  So ... it was pretty boring photographically speaking.

Between trying to break the four-minute-mile and there not being much to see, I only shot about 2 gigs of photos.  Comparatively, I hiked a place I wasn't ridiculously keen on last week (photos will get up eventually) where even though I was still in the middle of urban civilization, there were enough animals and flowers that I took about 10 gigs of photos in the same amount of time.

There were a lot of people in the woods that day.  A lot of kids and a lot of families with dogs.  So, again, no chance the wildlife was going to stick around.

I shot this sign when I was in the parking lot, waiting, just to test the equipment.  I find it kind of funny now...

See rule 4?  My initial reaction was, "Seriously?  Who's going to go wading in a forest lake?"  Well, we got up to the "Wishing Well" part of the park and there was a lagoon that was very, very low.  Which left a muddy bank from about five feet up the rock wall into the lagoon, which (judging by the dog swimming and playing in it) had to be at least four feet deep.  There were a couple of kids running up the bank and sliding down the mud into the water on their butts.  At first I kind of gave their dads a dirty look, like, "It's 60 degrees and I'm pretty sure you aren't supposed to let your kids play in the water."  (Not that I'd ever say as much, but I thought it).

And then I realized that thirty years ago, my brother and I would have been doing *exactly* that same thing.  My father would have been encouraging it while my mother stood to the side hoping there wasn't a stick popping up out of the mud that we'd snag on or a sharp rock on the bottom that we'd cut ourselves on (but not disallowing it or freaking out over what sliding in all that mud would be doing to our clothes.)

Speaking of signage, this one, from the auxiliary parking lot kind of cracks me up:

Don't get the impression this sign is old, but a.) it doesn't list 911 as an emergency number and b.) it doesn't give the area code.  And we were pretty far out in nowhere-Illinois, and I really don't know what the area code is out there.  I'm thinking we were too far south to be in 815 any more.  So my cellphone, which requires 10-digit dialing, would have been problematic.

I do want to try the place again in the spring or summer and preferably on a weekday when it's apt to be less crowded and have more interesting flora and fauna visible.

But, all that said, I did get a few interesting shots.

Long Lake

 Water is an integral feature of the park.  Largely, it's based on a canyon (hence the hiking back up 14 flights) that is carved by running water, much the same way the Grand Canyon was carved (only on a much, much smaller scale.)  This is one of the lakes that still had water.  You can see that some of the trees (but not many) are starting to change.  I really like looking at the reflections in water pictures.  It shows how still the water is now.

Carved Cavern in the Canyon

The canyon, I'm told, has an actual river running through it in the spring, but by the fall it's pretty dry and the water that is there is pretty still.  But you can still see the way the sandstone has eaten away the walls of the canyon and left caverns in them.

Rainbowed Cavern

To the right of this picture is where the kids were playing in the mud.  Despite their splashing and sliding, the water flattened quickly, the ripples didn't travel far.  I wonder if that has anything to do with the lime in the water.  I like this shot because of the different deposit layers and micro-flora layers on the rocks.  In the back you can see oranges and reds and purples from the sediments in the water and on the left you can see blues and greens from lichens and mosses and other 'air plants' like small ferns.

Crack in the Canyon

Here's one wall in the canyon with a grove cut in it.  I'm sure that when it rains hard enough, there's a fantastic waterfall here.  There are trees sticking out of the rocks all over the place in this park.  Sometimes gravity wins and the tree gets pulled down.  In certain places they create bridges that I'm sure the squirrels and such love.  In other places you just have these tree trunks hanging off the side of the cliff, their roots still holding them up even though the tree wasn't alive any more.

Quiet Creek

Here's the trickle of river that remains this season.  The water is brown from tannin in some of the plants and their parts (like acorns) falling in it.  It's not just muddy.  Even the clearer pools were usually gold or brown in color from this.

Sandstone Erodes

 Sandstone layers and small caverns. 

Sulphur Shelf Spots

One bright spot of color that I did find were a few samples of this orange fungus.  This is called a "Sulphur Shelf" fungus, and is apparently edible.  No thanks.  It's pretty though.

We Don't Need to Put Down Roots

A lot of the rocks had plants growing on or out of them.  I'm not sure what those long finger-looking plants are.  They have the texture of a regular leaf, but they seem to creep and grow like a lichen or moss.

Rocks Reflect

Another reflection.  You can see how still the water is as well as how dark the tannins make it.














Okay, I have one more post for this hike - not nearly as many as I would have liked to have had, but I think we're hitting that place where I need to resign myself to the fact that we're heading into that season where nature shooting gets a little bit harder.

Chicago Botanic Garden - 7.25.10 (2/2)

Okay, I thought it was odd that I'd only found ten shots from my last CBG trip that were good enough to post. So I went through the folder again. I had *edited* ten, but there were more. So here they are. :)

What made me think of it was these two shots. I knew I had some good rainbow shots and yet, I didn't have a 'rainbow' tag in my 'labels'. So I knew I'd forgotten to post something.

The color saturation here isn't so great, but I've never seen an almost perfectly horizontal rainbow before.

[Horizontal Rainbow]

This one was taken with a *just* slightly faster shutter (1/1000 here, 1/800 above), and a bit longer of a focal length and the color saturation was much better. Obviously I also changed position (the fountain was in the middle of a pond I was walking around), and the different angle helped as well.
[Fountain Rainbow]

So after about two months of searching the internet, I've discovered that this is a female red-winged blackbird. She was being highly cooperative from her perch on a purple coneflower.

[Not So Black Blackbird]

She even shifted to give me a very nice profile.

But there is some seriously weird stuff going on on that Y chromosome to make this bird (female)...
[Female Red Winged Blackbird on Coneflower]

... look like this bird (male of the same species.) (This shot from the North Pond)

I so adore this shot of a GIGANTIC green dragonfly. Not because he's so huge or so still, but because if you look at it closely, the light is coming in just right that you can see the *shadows* of his wing veins on the lilypad.

[Veins in Shadow]

Business end of a yellow-jacket. I spent about forty minutes chasing yellow-jackets around a pond trying to get just the right shot for the book I was working on for my nephew. (More on this later, in its own post, but the short version is, I made my nephew an alphabet animal book using only pictures I took myself. And I needed a good shot for Y. :) [Business end of a Yellow-Jacket]

This ended up being the shot I used. Clear shot of his wings, you can see how his thorax and abdomen are a.) not fuzzy and b.) very disjointed - which is how you know he's a wasp, not a bee. And check out those huge eyes.

[Yellow-Jacket Species Model]

I love these, but I somehow managed to forget to shoot the sign. I think they're a form of violet. Anyone have a clue?

[Perky Purples]

Another one I forgot to get the sign for. Looks like a pink fried egg. :)

[Pink Fried Egg Flower]








Okay, NOW I think that trip is done. :) What do you think?

The Magic Hedge - 7.20.10 (1/2)

I always love it when I go somewhere I've been before, especially if I've been there multiple times, and I find something new. When I hiked the Hedge last I found several species there that I'd never seen before.

I absolutely cannot Google a species on this bee.  I thought at first it might have been a queen, but that didn't seem to be it.  I can't tell how much of the yellow on the sides is pollen and how much might be actual bee fuzz.  If it's all pollen then it's probably a honking-huge carpenter bee with a TON of pollen on him, but if that's actual bee-fuzz... And these flowers don't have yellow pollen, so...  I'm stymied.  Anyone?
[Wide Angled Bee]

 A new species for me!  American Goldfinch.  I thought these things existed only in pet stores, seriously.  Or possibly somewhere far more tropical, like Brazil.  Chicago is not known for it's exotic and bright birdlife.  Mostly we have dirt-gray pigeons, you know?  Next I work on getting really *good* pictures of these guys.  But I was stoked to find him.  Actually I saw several before I left.

[The Goldfinch's Back]

Bug damage.  The plant this leaf-skeleton was attached to was seemingly healthy, but this leaf was *done in* by some kind of insect.  The resulting structure of veins is pretty interesting.

[Leaf Skeleton]

 Yet another new species!  This is a male downy woodpecker.  I'm a little fascinated by the way he can just stand on the tree and have his body be almost parallel to the ground.

[90 Degree Woodpecker]

 This is a root chicory flower.  They're everywhere in the Hedge now.  Yes, this is the stuff that gets ground up and used as fake-coffee-substitute in hotels and stuff.  Well, probably not the flower part, but this plant.  If you blow this up and look at the center, the pistol and stamen construction is pretty awesome.

[Chicory Blossom]

 Pine cones.  Lots and lots of pine cones.  I keep thinking this is the kind of shot that should be the background for something else or a computer wallpaper or something.

[Pine Cone Canopy]

 A tangle of native wildflowers.  Coneflowers, Queen Anne's Lace and Clover (I think the purple is clover, but if it is, it's really tall clover.)  That's Lake Michigan in the background.

[Prairie Flower Tangle]

 I've loved Queen Ann's Lace since I was a kid and they grew near the retention pond across the street from my house.  First of all, they're tough as nails.  Ever try to pick one?  Second of all, I love the flower-in-a-flower.  The little purple flower inside the big white one.  [Queen Anne's Lace]

 Queen Anne's Lace and Chickory growing together.  Things you learn from Google:  The root of the QAL is a wild carrot.  Who knew?

[Prairie Partners]

These are milkweed flowers.  There will be more about them in the second post from this walk.  But I love the monarch hanging off this one.

[Milkweed Monarch]








Ten pictures makes a post.  I'll post the rest of the shots from this walk next. :)

Chicago Done Naturally (Post 9 of 10) - Lincoln Park Zoo Conservatory

Lincoln Park Conservatory

Right next to the LPZ is the Conservatory. Basically, it’s a zoo for plants. Like the LPZ it’s free, and it’s a great place to warm up if you do the zoo in the winter. Just know that all your lenses will fog up if you go in when it’s cold out. (eyeglasses, camera lenses…)

The larger front part is pretty interesting – lots of plants I’d never heard of, but that are plenty interesting - but I like to spend a lot of my time in the orchid room in back.

Okay, in this shot.. does anyone else see people? Women in Victorian gowns and bonnets or something? Just me? Okay.

Everyone’s good with tripods and flashes, and there don’t tend to be many people, let alone kids, tripping over you. In fact, you’re more likely to run into other photographers than anyone else.

One of the reasons I like to shoot flowers here is that it’s inside and you can do some slow shutter, narrow appature work without having to worry about the wind blowing your flowers around. Also, everything is pretty clearly labeled so you know what it is that you’re looking at.

North Pond - July 14, 2010 - Post #2

Okay, here we go again. More shots from that same walk I was talking about yesterday.


A purple coneflower. More fun with macro mode. [Coneflower Near the End of the Road]








I'm learning to do a lot more with manual focus. For example, I wanted to focus on this grackle with a seed in his beak, but my camera kept insisting on focusing on the green leaf in front of him. It's trickier to get a shot quickly, but if your subject is sitting still for a minute, you do get a much better shot.

[Grackle with Seed]

This guy was adorable. He came creeping down from a higher branch and seemed pretty shocked to see me standing right under his nose. But instead of running back up the tree, he just flattened himself against the branch like, "You can't see me. I'm blending in!" Too bad the tree was mostly green from lichen. :)
[Flat Squirrelly]

Peekaboo turtle! Don't let fables fool you. Turtles - at least Chicago turtles - are pretty fast. This guy would hear my shutter, duck back under water swim a few yards, pop back up. I'd catch him, he'd duck under and come back up somewhere else. Very, very quickly. I love that you can see his feet and shell under the water in the breaks in the algae. [Peekaboo Turtle]

Near as I can Google, this is an upside down Carpenter Bee. I think the flower he's on is some kind of onion variety. Anyone know?

[Carpenter Bee]





Most adorable shot ever! The "Rainbow Duck" shot from yesterday is mom. She was swimming around this log while her babies sat up high and dried and preened and rested. I still need to look up what kind of ducks they are.

[Ducklings on a Fallen Log]




I love this as an artistic shot. I also love that my Google-fu found that this plant is called Blue Vervain and that the bee is a female bumblebee. This is the kind of shot that I end up filing away for the next Art Sharks or contest I find.

[Bumblebee and Blue Vervain]



So, truthfully, the smaller you make this shot, the better it looks. :p He took off, I held down my shutter and just followed him as he went. The good news is, the camera did know what I was focusing on (as evidenced by the almost invisible, yet still visible enough to be annoying tree branches in the foreground), the bad news is, there's a lot of blur when trying to catch a heron that's diving for its dinner. [Heron Goes Dinner Diving]

He's so much easier to catch well when he's sitting still. :)

[Juvenile Great Blue Heron Watches the Horizon]






And here he is in all his glory. And in context. I think I may have inadvertently focused on his chest because it's a little more in focus than his head. But given the distance I was at when I took this, I'm surprised it came out as well as it did (even if I did have to darken it a bit in Graphic Converter). I love how you can see the darker feathers coming in on his chest and in his tail. And a little detail? Look at the zig-zag reflection of the grasses in the water. [Young Heron in the Grass]


Okay, ten pictures make a post. Let me know what you think. :)