Florilegia! Part Deux...

Welcome to the second part of Florilegia!

It's way too early in the morning for Saturday considering I was on the road for 10+ hours yesterday and breaking my back moving my sister's stuff back home from school. Anyway, I'd like to finish up the round-up of my last month's activity with the photos below.

We'll start off with a pair lilac images. There are two lilac trees in my backyard - one produces purple flowers and the other, white flowers. I never really paid attention to these flowers until this year after they blossomed from unassuming and rather plain buds. Once bloomed, there was a strong fragrance in the air around the trees.

Below, we have blueberry flowers, some of which will eventually become plump blueberries. I love everything blueberry - muffin, scone, pie, yogurt, juice. I'm not sure why but foods with blueberries are just tasty!

Above, we have a full-view of a clematis flower; below, we have a close-up view. I had several photos of clematis flowers last year but what the heck.

Here we have the purple flowers of some type of green onion/leek/scallion plant from the front yard. These flowers are oddly similar to those of Chinese chives albeit purple rather than white.

The last seven photos here were taken with my DCM-FZ35 with the DMW-LC55 close-up lens attached. This is a nice add-on lens as it gives a 2-3x boost in magnification and a nicer bokeh! 

The two photos above are of lilacs and roses. Below, we have a hoverfly taking a break from erm...hovering. =P This little guy stood still long enough for me to snap some shots of it and boy are they quick when flying around.

Now, for the last round we have a few photos of the mudan species of peony. This flower has beautifully full petals and is quite large.

It seems like we've been getting rain more often than not lately, which puts a damper on my photographic activities but once it stops, a whole other opportunity is presented. Here we have some close-up shots of raindrops gathered on the mudan petals.

Well, that does it for now. We're fully caught up with my latest photographs and I suppose once I have another batch, we'll have my next post!

Hiya, Cynth!

What a pleasant surprise! A couple of days ago, I had mentioned that flowers in my backyard should be blossoming soon. So what have we here today? Some hyacinth already blooming!

Hyacinthus orientalis

Last year, I began my photographic adventure with these very same hyacinth plants. Some 15k+ photographs later, I've come full-circle. This year, I decided to use my DMC-FZ35 instead of my DMC-ZS3 since the former allows some more manual inputs. While the down-sampled images yield similar image quality, last year's ZS3 results seem cleaner than the FZ35's. Nonetheless, I'm pleased that the 2011 season has begun!

There are currently two cultivars in the backyard, one that is blue/purple and the other that is dark red/maroon in color. The white mass in the above picture is a clump of hydrangea flowers from last year's season. 

Here is an overhead view of one of the hyacinth clusters. For these photos, there was limited sunlight due to the setting sun so I was at the mercy of low-light and low-shutter speed. Steadying myself for these photos challenging especially with a light breeze and many attempts ended up being overly blurry.

For the last photo, we have some lilac buds, which should be blooming soon. The weather forecast is suggesting warmer and warmer days, so these will be beautiful flowers in short time!