On Sunday in the mid-afternoon, I headed out for a walk along the quay to see if I could find some good, colorful, healthy flowers. I'm always attracted to bright colors, and flowers are where the color is at. (Well, there's a lot of color in birds as well, but flowers tend not to fly away from me as often as birds do.)

Because it was a close-subject expedition, I had the macro lens on my camera rather than my usual supertelephoto. My macro lens is a Tamron 90mm f/2.8, and I'm very happy with it. It's fairly fast (meaning that it gathers a lot of light so the camera shutter doesn't have to be open long) and gives quite a sharp image. It will magnify small things a lot more than the supertele.

Before I got to the walkway on the quay, I had to pass through the courtyard of my building. There were a few interesting flowers out in the courtyard, but unfortunately the building was casting shadow on them so I didn't have direct sunlight, which always seems to add zing to flower shots. There were a couple of funky tulips that really attracted me, though, so I took some shots anyway.

Because there are so many types of tulips, horticulturists divide them up into different sections, similarly to what I recently described for the daffodils. One of the sections (number 7, if you must know) is fringed tulips, and the tulip above, and the one below, are fringed tulips, due to their hopefully obvious fringing.

I'm not sure exactly which cultivars (or subspecies) these particular tulips are, though. My best guesses are that the red one is the variety called Canasta, and the purplish one is Blue Heron.

They've done that combination before along the quay; I have some photos of it from one or two years ago.

It was still relatively early in the season, I guess, and the only showy flowers that seemed to be in bloom were tulips and pansies. While I was hoping for a little more variety than that, I wasn't overly disappointed, as there are so many different kinds of these flowers—and the city's gardeners do a fabulous job of mixing them up and keeping it interesting.

Here's a yellow tulip, past its bowl-shaped prime, but presenting a lot of interesting forms. Often older flowers interest me more than perky, youthful ones. They tend to have a lot more character.

Was I talking about flowers?

Well, I soon ran out of flowers, reaching the end of the walk along the quay. At that end, there's a market with a lot of little shops in it. My neighbor James runs the cheese shop there, and I stopped by to say hi and pick up some gouda.

You can probably also see that I've got a lot more detail on this bee than I did on the Drone Fly. That's the macro lens talking. With the supertele, I have to be at least two meters away to take a photo; with the macro, I can be a few inches away. And that is what I did for these photos. The photo below has the same amount of detail as the original of the one above, but I've cropped it closer, because I like gettin' all close up and personal with these wee critters.

The dark reddish-brown eyes and grey thorax mark that guy as your everyday House Fly. Which is fine by me, because they don't bite or sting or suck my blood.

After getting the fly shots, I tried to get the tulips and forget-me-nots in the same photo. This turned out to be harder than it sounds, because the tulips were fairly tall and the flowerbed was not large. To get the shot I really wanted, which was straight down into a tulip, I had to stand on tippy-toe and hold my camera above me. (Whoa! Tiptoe? These particular flowers? Where's my ukelele? I feel a song coming on...)

I took a lot of photos, because I wasn't able to get my eye behind the camera viewfinder and so I wasn't able to see what the photo would look like. Out of the many, I found some that I really liked, such as this one.

Actually, I don't just really like that shot, I really really like it. The colors and composition somehow just tickle my aesthetic in the right way.

Here's a more conventional shot, but still quite downward in order to get the forget-me-nots in frame.

I know I really enjoyed taking those photos, sticking my camera right up on the flowers, and seeing all the colors.

As a final treat, I found these little light-purple and blue babies in bloom. They certainly look to be a bluebell (flower in the genus Campanula) of some sort.

Those Campanula were about at the end of the flowerbed part of the quay. After shooting them I took my camera and my gouda and headed straight for home.

By the window, that's where I'll be,
Tom