Another “Blue Moon”, this time from January 19.

The double blossom photo that I was hoping I could take today!

The Summer Flowers Gallery of 2015 is the continuation of the Springflowers from June to September with all the flowers I shot outside and not on our balconies. Click on the preview photo above or on the link below to go to the gallery itself or you can head over to my Google+ Profile or the Flower Gallery Collection to find the G+ version – although I consider the version on my webspace the “master”.

« SUMMER FLOWERS 2015 »

This next sub-series of the City Views goes back to an already familiar area – it goes to the South from where we live, but at the same time it’s basically a walk up a hill. This is the corner of Mülheim’s Adolf- and Kämpchenstrasse and the tree in front of this old villa-like house is the copper beech that has featured in some of my Autumn shots before. Like on all the previous posts, there will be an alternative colour version and a Google Maps reference in the links below.
« Colour Version » | « Google Maps »

I was a bit on a roll before the cloudy weather hit – so here’s another
Moon from January 18, with a blue sky in the background for a change!

An almost double blossom feature on the bigger of our two Schlumbergera cactuses!

Next in the gallery posts is the Springflowers Gallery of 2015 with all the flowers from outside and not on the balcony from February to May – this is just the first part of four flower galleries. Click on the preview photo above or on the link below to go to the gallery hosted on my own webspace. You can also go to my Google+ Profile or the Flowers Gallery Collection to find the Google+ version.

« SPRINGFLOWERS 2015 »

Looking up Mülheim’s Eduardstrasse on the side of the block of houses we live in – apart from the lighter colour of the houses, this part of the street looks like it did almost sixty years ago.
« Colour Version » | « Google Maps »

More Moon and more craters from January 17. For those that tune in here for the first time: my Moon photos are not taken through a telescope, only with a modest Canon Powershot SX1 at 20x zoom (560mm in 35mm terms). At 10mp resolution, this allows an image size of only about 600×600 pixels, but I still love to try it once in a while because it’s amazing how much detail you can pick up with such a relatively “little” camera. Each photo is made up of about 15-20 stacked frames combined with Registax to get rid of the camera noise and bring out more detail. Final tweaking was done in Paint Shop Pro X with a bit of contrast and brightness balancing and a highpass filter in addition to Registax’ Wavelet sharpening. I wish I had a camera with an even more powerful zoom so I could get even closer, though!

A classic Schlumbergera blossom pose… it just opened today on the smaller of our two plants!