Lines, shapes and patterns ... in the Sunken Garden

I took a stroll to the bank this afternoon, and went via Garfield Park, as I always do. On the return trip, I took a quick look at how the outdoor tulip bulbs were doing in the Sunken Garden, adjacent to the conservatory. While leaving the Sunken Garden, the lines, shapes and patterns of the entryway gate caught my eye, and I started shooting -- yes, I'd brought along my PowerShot G12 -- and ended up with these images. I provide a perspective shot immediately below so you sortakinda know the sections I picked on to isolate in the closeups.

I end the post with a shot of the flag poles, to illustrate how windy it was this afternoon, and closeups of the Sunken Garden name on the bottom of the entry gates.

 

 

Early April sunset

 

The setting sun was a giant ball of orange Wednesday as it neared the horizon about 8:10 p.m. or so. I came upon it in Garfield Park in Indianapolis, just as the sphere was dipping below the tree line. And ... I had my PowerShot G12 in hand. I know ... flashback to February,  right?

It's been only a month a half since "The Tree" silhouette experience, but instead of being in the southwest part of the sky, the sun was almost due west. Those trees were doing a good job concealing the bright star, and I was having no luck maneuvering for a better vantage point to get more of the orb itself. It sank fast, much to my consternation. So I sprinted west to the railroad tracks, hoping to get away from the foliage and position myself for a clear shot. It wasn't to be. By the time I could get across the tracks, the sun had already dipped below the trees. But there was still this bright orange skylight and, thankfully, a few nicely textured clouds to give it some decoration.

Those are the Manual High School football stadium lights you see on the right in the photo above. After grabbing a few frames of those, I put the camera flat on the ground, tilted my articulating LCD screen up toward me to compose the shot, then pointed the lens toward the sky. It got me the shot of the grass blades, Photo No. 2, immediately below this text. I grabbed several frames of that shot as well, including a few using the G12's in-camera high-dynamic range (HDR) feature.

Photo No. 3, below the grass blades, is of the amber rays aflame just below Manual High School. 

On the walk home, while re-crossing the tracks, I looked south and noticed the white light at the rail signal street crossing along Southern Avenue and decided to see what I could get in a composition. I got low again, rested the G12 on the iron rail and took the Photo No. 4 below, again using the HDR feature.

Weird sky/cloud formations

Early Sunday evening, I noticed some weird cloud formations -- or, perhaps, jet streams? -- in the west/southwestern sky while I was outdoors and happened to have my PowerShot G12 with me, so I took some pictures. Turns out ... I had a short window of opportunity to lock in on a color shade, as the setting sun and/or its reflected rays transformed the color of these formations from the usual bright white to a bronze tint in a span of 10 minutes or so during the time I was observing and photographing.

There probably is a perfectly good explanation for these helter-skelter patters, and they probably are jet streams (shows you how scientific I am to not be able to recognize the difference). But of these streaks looked too wide and splayed for jet streams, and yet ... too narrow and too tubular for clouds. Perhaps it was a confluence of clouds and jet streams. 

I did a quick hunt online, and not surprisingly found that weird cloud formations are not usual, but in the pictures of examples of "weird cloud formations," I didn't see any examples that resembled these helter-skelterlike skyscapes!

The image at the top is a broad overview of the spectacle; the one immediately below is a somewhat tighter look at the same composition. Both were taken before the aforementioned bronzing effect, the first of which you can see in the portrait orientation two shots below.

Above and the next two below: After the sunset/bronzing effect took hold. That tiny black figure to the right of the formation on the left is a passing aircraft. A crop of the above frame to bring out better detail of the aircraft appears below.

 

 

Above: This is not entirely a sunset bronzing effect; while I did capture this after the sunset started tinkering with the cloud colors, it's also the result of a PowerShot G12 in-camera melding of three images captured in rapid succession (also known as high-dynamic range, or HDR).

The show in the sky

While still working on editing more than a thousand images taken Saturday at the Miracle Mile Parade in Indianapolis, I decided to dedicate a post to some things in the sky that caught my attention during the parade. All of these were taken with a 70-200mm lens equipped with a 1.4x extender at its maximum focal range (so 280mm).

The commercial airplane -- well, I suppose it might not have been that big a deal except for the craft's bright red underbelly. Even when I first spied it (picture below), it was impressive, but then it turned slightly and caught the sunlight in such a way that it lit up the craft's underbelly (top), and that's when I did my audible "oooooo" while the shutter clicked away.





The balloon -- there must have been a dozen balloons -- all yellow -- that I saw released (whether accidentally or on purpose) from the spectator contingent at various points during the parade. I wasn't lucky enough to capture its marking except for the one occasion you see pictured above. Otherwise, the "faces" on all my images of skyward balloons from Saturday are a bright, solid yellow (below).






The party streamers -- well, the festive occasion was open for stuff like this to be thrown about. Some floated skyward unobstructed (above); unfortunately, some did not, and ended up caught in the telehpone poles and wiring (below).




Send in the clouds -- I guess the cloud formation below isn't that spectacular, but it did strike me as interesting ... and besides, I wanted another sky image for this post! I played the "guess what it look like" game when I pulled it up on my screen at home afterward.



An interesting thing about these sky images, at least to me, is that I was able to snag that rich blue color in most of them without benefit of a polarizing filter (which I usually turn to when this is actually an objective). I also did very, very little tweaking of saturation in post-processing.

It was that beautiful of a day.