Ornamental Japanese Chestnut

This is the second year this tree in our backyard as bloomed and it is one of the most beautiful trees i've seen when its blooming. It also has a strong aroma, pungent, musky and very invading as some aromas can be. I can sometimes smell it a block away if i'm downwind. If you are not familiar with the aroma, then i'm guessing it just an unpleasant smell.

Mushrooms forest

Four days ago i picked up a stick — a small piece of wood, from the ground and when i looked closer at it i saw there were many very small mushrooms; a forest of mushrooms actually.

They are super small, maybe half the size of a grain of rice. It is the first time i've seen one of the ways that mushrooms spread their spoors - the outer cover splits and the hundreds of seeds spill out to be carried away on the wind.

To give a sense of their size, i put a penny beside the wood and took a photo of both the penny and wood:

Yes, that is really how small they are; about the size of the lettering on a penny.

I wanted to see if i could take some photos there were down in the middle of the forest —

I haven't done any cropping, these are all full frame. I think they are tight enough that i can crop tightly around one or two of the mushrooms which would give a good idea of how they are growing attached to the wood.

Currently i am storing the mushrooms in the refrigerator which seems to preserve them well so i can have another go at photographing them tomorrow.

Blooms with the Sony

Continuing to work with the Sony, yesterday i spent sometime learning how to use the camera for macro work:

Full image of a rhododendron 

cropped to the center

This is 21 images that are stacked focused. It turns out that neither Helicon Focus nor Lightroom will allow the Sony to tether into their software. Bummer, really. Makes this kinds shooting much more difficult, not impossible but certainly challenging.

A bit over a week ago i took the Sony to the local botanical garden and came away with these:

I didn't seem them at the time but there are a lot of aphids on the second flower stem clearly visible against the green background. I don't know what the name of this flower is.

There were also Lady Slippers that a passerby mentioned to me and they were beautiful and, i believe, i'd not seen this kinda of flower before other then a picture in a magazine:

And then there were these very cute little bells:

The plant that had these bells had hundreds of them and the difficulty was deciding how many to focus on.

All in all, the Sony is working out very well and i feel i've just barely touched upon its possibilities.

Sony

Have a new camera; Sony a7 lll. It is the one that i wanted as the Canon i have been using is getting to heavy to carry around - the Sony is 30% smaller and lighter, is full frame and, best of all, mirrorless. What does all that mean? I'll tell you when i know.

Couple of first images i took:

Amaryllis

Study or Guest Room

And yesterday i visited the NC Arboretum which is just a few miles from here and came home with these photographs:

The pink tulips were amazing

And one bumble bee 

This was a rather large bumble bee and whenever it landed on a flower, they bowed over; so, the bee is actually upside down and i rotated the image so it would appear on top when in reality is it hanging upside down.

Trees

Some of the trees looked pretty awesome standing cold and forlorn looking at the ice's edge —

Santa Fe Birds

Was in Santa Fe last week and where i was staying had three bird feeders hanging and they were heavily used. So i sat out back with my camera and big lens and took a few photos of them.

Western bluebirds which are quite different from the Northern Bluebirds around here:

The Western Bluebirds resemble swallows, a little bit, particularly the male above. That is a couple above with the female on the right and the male on the left - they were around the suet (which is what they are eating) everyday.

Quail ... rather different looking from the ones that lived at GGF which had the strange looking topknot. I wasn't very happy with the image but it was the best shot. The is: The scaled quail (Callipepla squamata), also commonly called blue quail or cottontop

from Wikipedia. Cottontop seems most appropiate.

Curve-Billed Thrasher ... a rather intense looking bird which did not hang about as the other birds did and i was lucky to get this shot.

And one of my favorite birds whose name i have to look up ... 

White Crown Sparrow, i think.

Behind ...

Am feeling behind on a variety of photographic fronts: haven't posted last week's gallery and haven't been spending an hour or so per day on reorganizing the files - without which the whole change over from date to category is fairly useless. Sigh, can't tell if it is a time issue or i'm just lazy - probably some of both.

We have an Amaryllis blooming and i've, again, trying to capture some of its bloomin' center. Here's the first effort:

It came out pretty (click on it to see it in large form) but the stamen and pistil could be sharper so i'm gonna tackle that shortly. This is a 40 photo image.

In the backyard, there are more moving critters (which i love seeing) and the first below has taken me a variety of shooting to capture. It is very shy and runs aways at the slightest noise:

A groundhog. There are a lot of them in Asheville. In the top image you see its paws just below its chin. It ate constantly and always seemed to have its mouth full. It was eating a particular plant, sorta a weed with purple flowers, not clover; at least not the clover plant that has been identified to me as clover. Will look up the plant he is eating.