TGIF Week 12 2012

It's been almost a week since my last group of posts on Sunday. A long quiet period when I engaged with the real world and let the virtual world fly past.

Oh, I read all the news coming across the various services and fired off a multitude of tweets of 140 characters or less. While Shakespeare may have written in Hamlet that "brevity is the soul of wit" all I proved in my tweeting is that brief nonsense is still nonsense.

But tweeting was a way to scratch the need to write itch, even if said "writing" was as mundane as my longer winded blog posts.

Today I worked at home to help look after my wife, who had an out-patient procedure to correct a vision problem involving her eyelids. After coming home and sleeping for nearly four hours, she's up and about and already is happy that her vision is completely unblocked. Before the procedure she said it was like looking through partially open curtains. Now we just need to follow the doctor's directions so that the small sutures around her eyelids will heal.

In the afternoon, between chores and before I went out to Whole Foods for some of their 365 spaghetti sauce, I happened to look out the back window onto the potted mandevillas I got last year for my wife, and happened to see the setting sun blazing through their blooms. We've got three types, a standard pink, a standard red, and a compound pink. The standards are together in the same large pot. The compound hasn't really started blooming like these beauties, but it will.

I used the E-1 and an OM 50mm 1:1.4 lens to take these. I was inspired to use this combination by Ken Norton and his latest post, "Late Winter, Idle Farms." Ken is an Olympus and comes closest to my own sensibilities when it comes to Olympus, heaping praise on the equipment and scorn on the company as appropriate. Unlike my own feeble efforts, Ken can make the E-1 with OM lenses simply sing out. It's always a pleasure to stop by and look at his photography.

I wasn't after some technically ultra-sharp photo, I was after trying to capture in some way the emotion I felt when I looked out the window. I wanted to capture the glow of the flowers as the late afternoon sun shown on and through them. I wanted to capture a sense of their beauty.

I get tired of all the dirty spots I see in the world; there are so many, so overwhelmingly many. With spring should comes renewal, bright bold colors that only nature herself can produce. And so I've been carrying my E-P2 and E-1 around and looking for opportunities to capture a little of nature's beauty as best I can.

Technical

Top to photos taken with the Olympus E-1 and Olympus OM Zuiko Auto-S 50mm 1:1.4 stopped down to f/2.8. Bottom two were taken with the Olympus E-P2 and M.Zuiko 45mm 1:1.7 stopped down to f/2.