Black Backgrounds

One thing I am learning about myself in retirement is that my natural waking-up time is about 7 a.m. I always thought I was a very early riser -- like 5:30 a.m. or so -- but apparently not! And maybe even this will change over time.

That's one of the cosmos in our garden, above. I've been experimenting with photographing flowers from behind -- a new way to see them. One of my commenters asked several posts back how I get that black background. It's easy -- I place the flower against a shadowy or shady part of the garden, set the exposure for just the flower, and the background naturally stays very dark. I don't even need to adjust it in processing.

Here's the same trick used on our bluebeard (Caryopteris), to less absolute effect. In looking up past pictures of the bluebeard I came across this post -- look how green the garden was in September 2023. So different from this year!

It's raining out there now, actually, though it's a very light rain -- maybe too light to do much. We are still in dire need of several days of good, long, soaking rain.

I spent yesterday morning trimming and neatening plants on the patio. I trimmed The Monster, the next door neighbor's climbing rose, and I cut blackberry out of the rock garden and dying leaves out of Barb the banana. She has mites again, which happens in very dry summers, so she's looking a bit ragged. I have two bags of garden waste sitting out at the curb now, waiting for collection.

I also finished "Our Evenings," Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel. I liked it the least of all Hollinghurst's books, to be honest. I loved his earlier works like "The Swimming Pool Library" and "The Line of Beauty," and I even liked his previous book "The Sparsholt Affair," which seemed to get mixed reviews from some readers. But this one felt dry and rather tedious, all the way to the somewhat abrupt ending.

In the afternoon I took the dog out for a walk. We passed a residential building near the railroad tracks with some remarkable graffiti on the side. HOW did they DO that?! They must have been hanging off the side of the building with ropes. Whether you admire graffiti as an art form or not, you gotta acknowledge the skill required to produce pieces like those -- and to be able to keep the letters uniformly sized and styled at such close range. I believe they say "Leak SMT" and "Alks."

The dog seemed sore yesterday after our long Heath walk on Sunday, and still a bit wobbly on her back legs, poor girl. Doesn't stop her from streaking across the garden after squirrels, though!