Memorial Day Weekend

This year, the weather in May has been lovely. As we approached Memorial Day, I noticed the pleasantness of the gentle breeze and crisp air. That reminded me of an expression we used to use in my youth for such lovely weather, “like lemonade!” It is refreshing, cool, slightly sweet, and with the gentle tartness of lemon to keep things crisp.

Memorial Day is For Remembering

That Saturday, we went out to the nearby nursery, Yard Works, and got a small pot of geranium for Jan’s folks’ grave. As luck would have it, they also had crocosmia plants we have been waiting for, and we picked up three good size pots. After stopping at the Ocean State JobLot to pick up a couple of small flags, we headed to the cemetery. They had the flags on tall poles, and families were visiting and remembering their loved ones.

Click on the images to see them larger, uncropped, and read their titles.

Jan placed the small flower pot on the metal nameplate and took a quick photograph, and I photographed her doing that of course! After chatting with another couple briefly, we headed back home.

How Else Can We Enjoy That Lemonade?

The weather was still like a glass of cool lemonade, and I asked Jan if she would like me to take her to Conimicut Point Park. We are lucky to have quite a few parks and public places in a town like Warwick, with about 83,0000 residents. The Conimicut Point Park is at the shore of the Conimicut Lighthouse, established to keep the ships from grounding in shallow waters. You can see the shallowness from the land to the lighthouse.

Here are Jan’s frames.

Click on the images to see them larger, uncropped, and read their titles.

The small park was neat and clean, with people enjoying the view, the weather, the small beach, and even fishing. We walked around a little and took photographs of the shore, the other side, and the ocean hiding behind the crisp air. The gentle breeze indeed felt good. It was time to return home and still enjoy the refreshing weather. Below are the ones I captured in both regular and infrared light.

Also, note the overall sharpness and presence of the first batch of photographs taken with the newly replaced Canon R7 and its kit lens.

Click on the images to see them larger, uncropped, and read their titles.

And, these are my infrared captures taken with my trusty M5 converted to infrared. Its lens is the parent of the kit lens on the R7, an EF-M 18-150 mm lens.

Click on the images to see them larger, uncropped, and read their titles.

You may have noticed that the last frames in my two collections above look similar. I took them with each camera aligning them as carefully as possible for later processing. I converted the infrared version to black-and-white and blended that with the full-color image in Photoshop to have another Fool’s Spectrum frame! Here it is, the full-color frame blended with the B&W infrared.

Have Another Sip of Lemonade

The next day, Sunday, was also very nice. We enjoyed a longer-than-usual “short walk” in the neighborhood. This has been one of the longer walks we took in quite a while, well under one mile but more than a half!

As we turned around one corner, I saw our shadows, still standing tall against the crisp evening-dappled light. Another interesting encounter was with a fox on the road! I saw it coming from one side of the road and moving toward the other. I managed to take a photograph, just a record of the encounter, as the fox is way too tiny in the center. A little later, we were back at Villa Ekin!

And, yesterday, our neighbor Rick planted the crocosmias for us in the backyard. Good to have good neighbors!

We Finished The Lemonade

As I write this article on May 30, the crisp, lemonade-like weather got polluted by the Canadian wildfire smoke and debris. I shut all the windows, turned the AC on, and set the fan to come on for fifteen minutes every hour to filter the air in the house. It still looks sunny, but the haze is unmistakable.

That refreshing glass of lemonade was gone!