Tag: summer

fresh tomato photos (friday foto finder: tomato)

This week’s friday foto finder theme is “tomato.” While I certainly have taken many a tomato photo in recent years, I have also already posted many of them. Happily, here in New England, it is the season for fresh tomatoes. Indeed, this year, they are especially bountiful. I have joined a CSA again this year, and the tomatoes have been plentiful there. In addition, a close friend and neighbor has been experimenting with growing hydroponic tomatoes on her deck.

The experiment has been very successful, and she harvests many tomatoes each day. When I stopped by her house this afternoon, she had these guys all lined up to get a bit more time ripening in the sun. They caught my eye, and jogged my memory about the theme for fff this week. So, for a change, instead of digging through my photo library, I have some fresh photos.


I like the tomatoes’ rather menacing shadows.


Here, I liked the the low angle of the sun lit up the leaves.

Somehow, tomatoes have made very regular appearances on this blog, both in terms of photos and as a topic of discussion. Tomatoes, in fact, seem to be a running theme in my life, what with my use of the pomodoro method. It would seem that this is (at least) my 12th post with a tomato base. And it is probably safe to forecast that tomatoes will appear again here.

To see what other tomatoes have been served up for the fff theme, pay a visit to the friday foto finder blog!

Summer’s last hurrah

This photo was one I took the weekend before last, during our trip to New Hampshire for a day at Canobie Lake Park, an old and old-fashioned amusement park. It has become a tradition for us to go there the last weekend of August, to finish up the summer with a big bright and shiny adventure of lights and rides and noise and sugary treats and junky souvenirs. One last hurrah before the school year starts and the days start to grow noticeably shorter and darker.

catching fireflies

We drove down to my in-laws’ yesterday evening, arriving a bit after 8, with the light just barely fading. After we unloaded the car and spent a little time with Grammy and Grampa, we headed to the back yard, lured by the twinkling flashes of light. In the the deep twilight, the lawn was sparkling with the light of dozens of fireflies. John grabbed a few empty jars (my mother-in-law is always one to have a good supply of empty containers handy), and I grabbed my camera.

The fireflies were remarkably easy to catch. One had to do little more than reach out a cupped hand towards a low-flying nearby flash. When I did this, more often than not, the firefly would land on my hand. The kids enjoyed running around catching and collecting them in the jars.

I tried to catch the sparkling with my camera.

The little buggers turned out to be remarkably hard to catch flashing. I aimed my camera at one of the rapidly populated jars. Click. Click. (Nada.) Click. Click. (Zilch.) I’d take a dozen shots, with nary a flash. Then stop, look up. (Flash!) Click! (Too late.) Using manual focus, and the setting for rapid-fire shooting, I squatted low to the grass. Click-click-click-click. Click-click-click. (Score!) Several hundred shots later caught me fewer than 2 dozen moments of flash. (But it was fun.)

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Here’s a little slideshow of some of my shots of one of the jars, where I’ve edited out some of the flash-less photos. If you click on the forward button, you can get a bit of an animation effect seeing the fireflies crawl around the jar.