Category Archives: Nature

“Butterflies are self propelled flowers”

Posted by JEANNE RAMSAY on

Title quote by R.H. Heinlein

Today we visited the Butterfly Pavilion for the first time.  It’s pretty cool.  Bugs, spiders and other creepy crawlies thrive in (safe and secure) glass boxes under warm lights.  Colorful fish, crustaceans and other wiggly, swimming, little sea creatures pass the time in what appear to be giant fishbowls.  Brave little kids let a scary, hairy tarantula named Rosie, crawl on their hands.  (I get the shivers just thinking about it.)  I put on my big-girl pants and touched a big horseshoe crab (only for a second and with permission).

My favorite part of our visit was the Wings of the Tropics exhibit:  a lush, humid, tropical garden filled with exotic plants and flowers with graceful curves and seductive swoops that have names I can’t pronounce without great effort.  The tropical colors are incredible…bright reds, pinks and fuschias, deep velvety greens, electric blues, brilliant yellows and warm golds.  A gentle mist filters into the garden keeping both sturdy plant leaves and fragile flower petals blanketed in sparkling diamonds of water drops.

Most incredible though are the beautiful, fluttering butterflies that fill the air.  Their colorful wings propel them silently about like hosts of swirling angels.  Sometimes you can’t even see them; nevertheless, you know they’re there.  If you’re lucky, one will alight on your sleeve.  Like being kissed by an angel.

Lowii Swallowtail aka Great Yellow Mormon
Backlit Leaves
Painted Lady Butterfly
Spider Lily Bud
Blue Tang Fish, Orange Clown Fish, Bubble Coral
Pink Cone Ginger
Clown Fish with Bubble Coral
Blue Tang Fish
Red Hibiscus
Misty Bench
Hibiscus Bud
Peace Lily
Peace Lily Backlit
Powder Puff Flower
Great Mormon Butterfly
Red Stripes on a Butterfly
Hibiscus
Common Buckeye
Green Surf Anemone

A garden and a ghostly mine

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I love driving around in Colorado!  This weekend was no exception.  After lunch on Saturday in Castle Rock, it was on to Garden of the Gods, an amazing geological park just outside Colorado Springs.  I would love to explain to you all the different rock formations and how they came to be, but I’m no geologist.  In fact, some who know me might even say I don’t know schists from Shinola!   But what I do know is how to point a camera at pretty rocks!

Garden of the Gods

 

Cathedral Spires

 

Garden of the Gods in black and white

 

Sunset buck

 

Today I happened upon an abandoned mine above Central City…the Coeur d’Alene mine.  When I left Denver, the weather was sunny and mild.  As I drove higher up into the mountains, the clouds started to flex their muscles and show off by spitting snowballs…little tiny ones. It got cold and windy, the sky turned a grayish white – not optimal photography conditions.  But the mine was striking in its imposing, rusty splendor.  I was drawn to quiet deserted corners.  I apprehensively peered into doorways and tried to jump up to see in windows.  I imagined the power of the now forgotten machinery as it may have once been: roaring and belching the smoke of productivity.  I watched, waited, listened…for the stories.  I heard them.

Tractor and shed

 

Wheat and bolts

 

Danger window

Rusty shingles

Rusty National

Rusty buckets

Rusty bolts

Nails in the wall

Big Bolt

Coeur d'Alene Mine

 

 

 

A walk around a lake and a stroll through a cemetery

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The weather in Denver last weekend was perfect for taking a lazy walk, dawdling lakeside, meandering around an old cemetery or enjoying a sightseeing, people-watching drive around the city.  Sloan Lake Park was sprinkled with folks leisurely strolling, energetically walking, healthfully jogging, racing around on bicycles or dutifully pushing strollers.  Kids were playing with bright colored balls and floating balloons on strings.  Games were being played on asphalt courts. Bits and pieces of conversations, carried along on gentle autumn breezes, could briefly be overheard .  Geese obliviously plucked at the still-green grass or enjoyed a dip in the azure blue water.  Two fluffy squirrels perched high atop a building’s rooftop ledge kept a nervous eye on all below.  The sun’s warm rays cast a burnished red on drying plants and tall cattails at the water’s edge.

The sloping hillsides of the historic Golden Hill Cemetery are scattered with aged headstones: some still standing tall, some leaning over with age, and still others toppled over.  The landscape seems long ago consumed by nature’s overgrown grasses, weeds and leafless trees. The stillness of the afternoon air provoked a certain melancholy.  Yet the quiet beauty of the late fall day was apparent – and appreciated.

Horse a piece

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I don’t know much about horses (Equus ferus caballus).

I do know that they’re large, and they’ve been on the planet for a long time…domesticated since 4,000 BC (who doesn’t love wikipedia?)

Some are brown. Some are black.  Some are white.  An Appaloosa has spots.

They go “neigh, neigh,” and in the winter they can pull a sleigh (usually with bells on)…I’ve even seen great big horses pulling carts of beer through the snow (on television often during Budweiser commercials).

I have ridden a horse a couple times in my life.  Usually under duress and at a management team-building retreat.  It’s always scary (because I’m a city girl…and where are the brakes on those things anyway?)

That doesn’t mean that I don’t find horses and all the accoutrements beautiful.  I do.

I didn’t have to look far to find these two photogenic horses…they were prancing around the training ring at our neighborhood park.  One of them was adjusting to a new bridle something or other.  And they posed for me.

For those of you who thought you were going to read about Bar Dice and shots…yer buyin’, eh!

Today, it was white

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It snowed in Denver today.  The first white snow of the season is always bittersweet…beautiful to look at, but it’s messy driving. The still leafed-out trees weighed down with nature’s white burden caused power-related problems, broken trees and insurance claims.

It was still pretty – the white, that is.

According to empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com, the color WHITE is significant because it symbolizes “innocence and purity. White is the beginning of everything, before anything is muddied or thinking is ‘colored’.  White represents the clean slate, helping us through times of stress, and allowing us to put the past behind us and preparing us to move on. White represents the positive as well as the negative aspects of all colors. It contains an equal balance of all the colors of the spectrum.”

Rest easy, snow-bound compatriots; after all, white is just another color.  White means so much more than snow.

In fact, I am posting photographs of things that are white, but not snow –  just to prove my point!  

 

 

Perspective allure

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Glamorous moments are found in the most unexpected places:  wandering past an often ignored bush along a sidewalk, peering into a dried up field of weeds, or catching the long, low rays of sunlight at day’s end.

Enhance your view of the world by looking at it from a fresh perspective.  Underneath, sideways, crooked or askew.  Above, below, or cross-eyed.  Darkened, lightened, softened, or hardened.

The allure is often left in the dark and unexplained.

Images of a walk in the park and a stroll under a bridge (Red Cliff, Colorado).

Focus on nature

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The Denver Botanic Gardens is a local destination.  It’s almost in my front yard.  I’ve visited before.  But not like today.

Today I tried to focus on something different.  Focus itself.

Focused attention?  No.  I was totally paying attention.  I was in the moment, to be sure.

I was trying to focus my camera on nature…all at once:  photographic composition, proper exposure and technical execution, exquisite light quality, artistic expression, contrast of color, texture, and emotion, etc.

Well, that’s nuts.

Nature doesn’t work that way.  Nature happens in moments.  Sometimes the moments happen in color, or not.  Sometimes nature’s moments are a contrast in light or texture.   Sometimes nature is not at all artstic.  At other times, nature’s moments are elusive or ambiguous.  And sometimes, the best of nature’s moments are unfocused.

Stop squinting.  

The local wildlife scene

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I haven’t been to a zoo in years.  Maybe more.  Not by chance, by choice.

But, today I decided the zoo would be a picture perfect way to spend a picture perfect autumn afternoon in Denver.  The temperature was in the high 70’s. The sky radiant in brilliant blue punctuated with high, wispy white clouds.  The perfect opportunity to try to capture (!) animals with my camera.  So off I went.

I saw lions (all hiding in the tall grass, their faces to the wall), and tigers (mostly sleeping inside having just eaten a gigantic lunch no doubt), and bears (I actually didn’t see one bear except the cute white one which I did manage to photograph – in fact, I’m fairly certain that my chances of seeing a real bear are better on the local hiking trails than at the zoo – just sayin’).

Monkeys are impossible to photograph because they won’t hold still.  Cute as they are, I don’t think they like being photographed – they’ve probably all agreed.

Peacocks know they’re the most prized of all photographic subjects at the zoo once they care to show their hand – but they don’t.  Care.  To show their hand.  Instead, they lure amateur camera bugs into following them around countless baby strollers and under picnic tables in the hopes that a full panorama of peacock beauty will be presented.  It won’t.  Sigh.

Chain link fences and slobber-covered, plexi-glass panels separated me from dozens of precious “animal planet” expressions…countless missed National Geographic-caliber shots, I’m sure.  But I did manage a few shots that I consider worth sharing with you.

Oh, and this is directed to one dad in particular, camels are not pachyderms.

At what point do we acknowledge autumn’s arrival?

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When is it each year that we relinquish the carefree days of summer?

When do we trade the universal perfume of freshly mown grass for the unmistakable scent of raked leaves?

Is there a specific moment when we no longer notice the smells of swimming pools and wet towels, but embrace the aroma of crackling fireplaces and baking pies?

Does autumn officially arrive only once we have donned our first sweatshirt, noted the earlier hour of twilight each day, or witnessed the first golden leaves of change on the trees?

Is there a specific moment in time when we are no longer aware of the rhythmic clacking of skateboards traveling past the house or admit to missing the hollow echos of nearby bouncing balls and the exuberant, joyful laugher of children?

Is autumn’s arrival evident only once we recognize a new quiet; a quiet hauntingly void of the sounds of chirping crickets and singing birds?

Do we hear autumn’s arrival in the thunderous sound of crowds cheering favored football teams to victory in the chill of the evening air?

Is this when autumn has truly arrived?

I believe autumn arrives the moment we notice.