Our dessert plums are ready for picking:
This was Friday’s photo which I took about an hour before we picked some of the plums from this tree – we picked nearly a bucketful – about 15lb – in about 10 minutes. Most of these are now in our freezer.
It was difficult to find a suitable bunch of these plums to photograph: most were just ones or twos, others had damaged or rotten ones in the group (you may just see a rotten one behind a leaf near the top). I finally settled on this group of four as they were nicely spaced out although I would have preferred more leaves to the right.
On Monday morning, on my way to let the turkeys out, I spotted this drop of dew on the tip of a leaf on a sycamore tree:
What I like about this image is the pattern of the leaf structure within the drop of water which appears to have slightly magnified the detail. I have cropped the original image by about 50% so as to see better the dew drop. In the full image you can just make out the outline of the trunk of the tree and lower branches.
Tuesday, I took this Physostegia (Obedient Plant) for my wife. She wants a collection of photos of plants that she grows in flower – this is one of several I took that day.
For Wednesday I wanted to show dew on the grass. This was difficult to take without getting wet by lying on the grass. I managed by crouching down but it was difficult seeing the screen. My camera, although it is a compact camera, has a manual focus option. I set this for the closest focus point, and moved the camera back and forth until I was reasonably certain that I had the drops in focus – even then I wasn’t sure though until I loaded the image onto the computer. I was pleased with this result which is a crop of about 50% of the original image:
On Thursday morning I needed to pick the runner beans so I took my camera with me. I wanted to get a view of a group of beans with the foliage fully occupying the background. The beans tend to grow along a stalk which means that to get them all in focus I had to be at right angles to the stalk. In most cases this resulted in a background other than the bean foliage. I had to search through most of the bean plants to get this image:
Larger versions and the full set of these photos can be seen in the Garden Gallery.