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Sunday, August 7, 2011

Beautiful Blooming Hydrangeas at the Allied Arts Guild

Yesterday I went to the Allied Arts Guild in Menlo Park, CA to attend the "A World Away” Photo Exhibition" by my professional friend, and professional photographer, Elley Ho. Only problem was that the show wasn't yesterday the 6th, it's next Saturday the 13th of August. Oops!


So instead I spent an hour at the Allied Arts Guild photographing the blooming hydrangea clustered around the fountain in their "Garden of Delight," also known as "The Blue Garden," with my new Micro Four Thirds, Panasonic Lumix GF2 camera and zoom lens.


In fact, I spent a good portion of time shooting in manual mode to learn more about how the ISO setting on my camera works. For the most part I had to set my ISO to 400-800 to get these shots as the hydrangea were in a very shady area. The photos aren't perfect but they are part of my learning curve so I thought I'd share them with you because several people seem to be following my progress with the new camera.

Plus they just kind of made me go "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh" and feel relaxed just looking at them.


I was really amazed by all of the color and petal variations I could see in one place. Beautiful blues, purples, and greens along with bright pinks, salmon pinks and shades of violet, orchid and even some soft pastel'ish shades of khaki gold and olive green.

Some of the blossoms were tiny and others were large and rather floppy looking.

The size of the clusters ranged from small and tightly packed while others were large and loose and hung like enormous floral pendulums from their stems.


Did you know there are so many colors? I kind of knew but I don't think I realized just how many.


Classic Blue Hydrangea


Enormous Pom Poms of Bright Pink


Unusual Olive and Wine Pastels


Minty Green and Bright Blue Mini Blossoms


I loved both the watercolor and the paint splatter effects on this cluster.


And amazing shades of lavender blue-violet. These reminded me of iolite or tanzanite gem stones.


Elley is hosting an exhibit of her work along with the work of Scott Taylor after spending four weeks together in some of the remote villages located in the Himalayan Mountain Range of Nepal capturing the daily lives of the children who live there. They also served as volunteer teachers during their stay. Their trip was arranged through an organization called NEIO, the Nepal Education Initiative Organization.

I think I need to start wearing my glasses when I put things into my online calendar as this has now happened to me several times this year. Only once did I miss an event. What's more typical is that I show up a week or day early. Well, at least yesterday I ended up in a beautiful venue and just happened to have my camera with me so I was able to make the most out of what turned out to be a not-so-bad situation.

I'll be posting next week about how Elle's show was. If you've never been there before, the Allied Arts Guild is located just down the street and around the corner from Stanford Shopping Center. Maybe I'll see you there!

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