Summer Weather Is Here!

As the title of this post suggests, summer weather has finally arrived! Temperatures have been kissing 80*F (27*C) and my AC has been turned on for maximum effect. I love summer but unfortunately, don't have much heat tolerance; however, that doesn't hold me back from going outside and snapping away!

We'll start off where we left off last time, with the mudan peonies. A side effect of the spring-summer transition is rain...lots of it. This year, the timing seems particularly bad as the warm weather brought about a lot of blooms, only to be followed by rain. This has the undesirable effect of withering the flowers prematurely, which ironically, presents a photographic opportunity in and of itself. Here, we have the fallen petals of a mudan peony:

Near the mudan peony is a clematis bush. I hadn't intended to take pictures of this particular flower but did since there was a bee on its petals. Last year I got some nice shots of bees gathering pollen from a sunflower, which was pretty cool to watch.

All of the photos is this batch were taken with the DMW-LC55 close-up lens installed on my DMC-FZ35. This lens works great in capturing the fine details as seen below. I was also quite pleased to see that the white clematis was not overexposed.

Okay, let's take a break from the clematis flowers. We actually have several varieties of them in the front/backyards but we'll take a look at them later on and give other flowers a turn. I'm not sure what the purple flower in the first photograph below is so if anyone does, then please let me know! The latter two are a rosebud and and iris, which is a spectacularly elegant flower with beautiful colors.

Guess what? It's back to clematis flowers! These flowers are from a clematis bush in the front yard and I just couldn't resist the perfect lighting the sun provided at the moment. The DMC-FZ35 really shines when there is adequate lighting.

The variety of clematis below is different from the magenta and white-petaled ones above in that it has blue-purplish petals arranged in a much more intricate pattern. Personally, I like this type of clematis the most because of its beautiful colors and multitude of layers of petals.

All around the front/backyards, I am seeing peony buds preparing to bloom. There are actually a couple that have already bloomed but the majority have not. I will be traveling for work next week so hopefully they will hold on until after I return home to bloom. Stay tuned!