Taken on April 9.
I shot the above photo with my phone this morning. It’s the same azalea hedge that I shot in the below picture a month ago. It runs next to my driveway and sort of walls off my backyard from the street.
What a difference a month makes. Which reminds me. I need to get out a hose and wash the thick coat of pollen off my car…
- Taken on March 9.
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Nice azaleas. Mine aren’t that thick with blooms, but I don’t do anything to them other than trim them with hedge-clippers in the fall.
We haven’t done anything to those in years. They stand about 8 or 9 feet high, and run maybe 30 feet in a curve that, as I said, sort of walls off my back yard from a side street.
I keep expecting them to fail to bloom or wither away because we haven’t pruned them, but they burst out every spring…
As long as they are healthy and growing they should bloom nicely. Trimming them in the fall is OK, you just don’t want to trim them in the spring once they start budding. Azaleas and Rhododendrons are two of my favorite plants. Hit them with some “Holly-Tone” every year or so.
Now, let me change the subject.
I had originally intended to post this two days ago, when I shot it. But when I went to do it, I saw that my free trial of PhotoShop Elements had run out. (Long story. I got a new laptop several months ago, and it’s wonderful in every way except that I’ve been unable to transfer the very old copy of Photoshop I had on my old laptop to the new one. And the disk is long gone. So until recently, I kept using the old one for blogging, because I had to have something to work pictures with.)
I didn’t want to deal with that right then, so I set the matter aside.
Then yesterday, I went ahead and paid the 100 bucks (technically, $99.99) to buy the PhotoShop Elements (having determined that while it was not full PhotoShop, it did the things I needed — the main thing being, allowing me to quickly reduce the size of picture files).
So, having emailed the azaleas picture to myself from my iPhone, I called it up in my newly purchased application.
And the color was all screwed up. That rich, deep color you see above (quite accurate) was totally washed out to a sort of light lavender or something. I fiddled with the color settings, and lightness and darkness and contrast, and couldn’t make it look anything like reality. Then, I started flipping through other pictures in that folder, and all were sort of weirdly off.
Then I realized that when I called up the file in Windows Live Photo Gallery, the colors were similarly distorted. Which made me think it was something in the display settings of my laptop.
But… here’s where it gets very weird… when I viewed the emailed picture within gmail, it looked fine. On the same laptop.
Then… I realized that those distorted-looking pictures I was calling up in my blog folder — pictures I had recently posted — looked fine on the blog itself.
So, I decided to completely ignore the fact that the azaleas picture looked like a color negative or something, and just resize the picture and post it, as an experiment.
And I did. And it looked fine on the blog.
So, it looked fine when I sent it to myself, including on the laptop. But if I called it up in the Windows photo viewer, or in PhotoShop, the exposure was distorted to a bizarre degree. But if I didn’t do anything to it and went ahead and put it on the blog, it was back to normal.
Anybody know what in the world is going on? Because I’ve just wasted a lot of money on PhotoShop if I can’t realistically see color and contrast and make adjustments. A hundred bucks is a lot to blow on just being able to take an image down from 36 inches to 16…
I thought the pollen was bad before, but today I am sneezing despite two different antihistamines and closed windows. Spring can really hang you up the most!