Janet Brien's photos with the keyword: plant

Here is another picture from my striped canna series what I captured at the Harry & David public garden. I loved how this leaf was still curled on one side. :)

(+1 in a note above) Wonderful, wonderful Hosta, this gorgeous ornamental plant is grown primarily for its large and beautiful foliage. This type, with green leaves and white edging, is more common, but these plants are found in a number of lovely colors and combinations, including solid green in different shades, yellow, green and yellow, and all shades of green and white or green and cream. I took this picture at my friend Elaine Sweet's garden. I got another image as well, and if you would like to see it, just roll your mouse over the upper left corner of this image.

(+1 in a note above) If you're not a gardener, you may not know that many plants selected in a garden are selected for their greenery or other vegetative displays, and not for their flowers. Hostas are very popular for their variety of leaves, colors and patterns. They do have dainty flowers to admire, but the show is truly their beautiful greenery. My friend Elaine, who lives in nearby Ashland, had several of these lovely plants in her garden when I visited a few years ago, and I was delighted at the opportunity to capture their stunning leaves. (If you'd like to see a nice product page which shows nicely presented images of hosta varieties, take a peek at White Flower Farm's Hosta page! Wikipedia has a nice page as well but you'll enjoy seeing all of the pictures a lot more! :) I took this picture at my friend Elaine Sweet's garden. I got another image as well, and if you would like to see it, just roll your mouse over the upper left corner of this image.

When I visited my friend Elaine's garden a few years ago, I was delighted to find both flowers and decorative plants to photograph. When I found this Sage plant, I was immediately taken by its beautifully fuzzy leaves and two-toned color. I experimented to try to get an interesting image and found success in a very shallow focus on the front leaves. What surprised me was the wonderful bokeh the fuzz provided! I feel a very strong urge to pet the leaves, and am so disappointed that my computer monitor isn't soft and fuzzy! :D Thanks Pam, for letting me know this is Sage! :) I asked Elaine and she confirmed it: SAGE! :D

(This is my submission for The Sunday Challenge: Curves :D) Yesterday Steve and I spent a couple of hours at Riverside Park in Grants Pass, Oregon, and really enjoyed the autumn show going on there. As I was walking around, I noticed the evergreen plants too, and walked over to look at this Holly bush. Suddenly I noticed that many of the leaves had no prickles! How odd!! I found out that this can occur because of drought, young leaves will sometimes not have prickles, and if a Holly shrub is really huge, it may stop producing the prickles because it has enough leaves that the energy necessary to produce the prickles isn't necessary. (I wonder about that answer...) If you would like to know more about this plant, Wiki has a great page here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holly

I found this pea pod glowing warmly, the sun shining through and illuminating the seeds inside. The texture and tones are amazing to me--it's very hard to see this unless the sun is shining through the pod! I was very happy with the bokeh too! That's another thing about macro photography that you may not know: unless you take the time to study every picture just after you take it, the bokeh is largely an unknown. After literally over 100,000 pictures, I'm finally getting an small idea of what I might expect, but it takes forever to translate crisp surroundings into bokeh in your mind. Two years in and I'm finally beginning to learn this "language." I think the myriad facets of macro photography are endlessly fascinating and I love that there will always be a neverending world of education waiting for me!

1 picture above in a note! :) You see these two interesting looking things? They are both halves of a single pea pod after it's split open and released its seeds! For a better understanding, roll your mouse over this picture to see the previous picture I posted. That is a dried pea pod just about to burst open and spray its seeds everywhere! After the seed are released, the edges of each half will naturally begin to curl into this interesting shape! Isn't that cool?!! The background of this image was desaturated a bit so that the pea pod would stand out better. One of the problems of taking picture in a meadow of dried grass and weeds is that the subjects tend to have the same tonal range. By selecting the focal object and placing on its own layer in Photoshop, the background can then be manipulated separately. Having the subject on its own layer also allows me to apply sharpening filters or whatever I like to enhance the object in subtle ways, further separating it from the background.

How's THIS for cool?! When wild pea vine tendrils dry up, they are very tiny and hard to see, but once I found a one, I was able to locate more all over the place! This pair of tied up strands was a wonderful find, full of curling goodness! :D Because the tendrils are blond and the background was light beige, I changed the background color to a tinted monochrome and then added some vignetting to add depth. I then gave it a sandstone texture to give it a more tactile quality.

This image was taken with our Canon 5D on our property in Southern Oregon on November 4, 2011.

These are such bizarre looking plants! We have lots of them in our meadow, and every one has an interesting shape! They can grow as high at 6-7 feet tall!!! This image was taken with our Canon 5D on our property in Southern Oregon on November 4, 2011.

This image was taken during the month of October, 2011.

I found this amazing plant while taking a walk through my neightorhood. Isn't this neat?!

I found this cool plant while taking a walk through my neightorhood. Amazing.

(for those of you who are interested in seeing my San Francisco trip images, I have uploaded 10 pictures in this batch [219 in the past few weeks]. Thanks everyone for your comments and your visits to my photostream! I hope you enjoy the show!) (Oh, and yes, I know there are really too many pictures to be uploading at one time but I have too many images I want to put into my Flickr stream so it just can't be helped!) While I was walking around my old neighborhood, I was overwhelmed at all the subjects to photograph. This beautiful lily provided me with the perfect opportunity for pistils surrounded by blush pink! By the way, for those of you who may not know, there is a very fun, free Flickr competition site which you might like to take part in. It's called FlickrDuel and features dozens of ongoing competitions, or duels every day. You can enter your pictures into many different categories and vote on contests too. It's another way to enjoy your photography! This image was taken during my trip to San Francisco during September 12-15, 2011.

One of my favorite plants is the "Sensitive Plant", which has leaves that react to your touch. This plant looks very similar but sadly, didn't react to my fingers running over its leaves. Very beautiful though with its rich color and perfect symmetry. This image was taken during my trip to San Francisco during September 12-15, 2011.