Today's pictures

Many subjects, many pictures. I will try to limit how many I post.

First up, sunrise - looks ominous:

My leopard lilies (Lilium pardalinum) are starting to bloom. My attempts to propagate them over the winter failed. I have the same number of plants I had last year, so maybe this year I will do some research on how best to produce more of them.

And while walking one of my dogs this afternoon and saw a turkey tail fungus:

A storm moved through this evening, I looked out the window and saw a rainbow. It is a double rainbow but the outer one is very faint.

Then we had a groovy sunset. 

That's is all.

Is there a doctor in the house?

This didn't happen twenty years ago

We've been having great stormy weather around here, especially in the afternoons. It rained hard. Gradually dark and suddenly windy overwhelmingly drenching with rain and as a complete pouring is winds down somewhat the sun comes out while this is still happening as if the clouds are used up while rain is still being delivered from altitude then the rain wind and darkness suddenly stop and all that is left is a bright cloudless day and birds that dare coming out.

And the whole time I was thinking, I bet I am in a rainbow. If you were on Federal I'd be in a rainbow. This is like the fifth time this happened similarly this year.

About this same time last year was an even more severe rain storm. I'm such a dunce sometimes. The lens I was using is perfect for this. It is made for this goofy light reflecting situation. The lens has a nano crystal coating inside to prevent light bouncing around in there. It also has two extra low dispersion elements and precision glass mold aspherical lenses to control chromatic aberrations. The cloudscape was incredible and dynamic all day, the drama showing in degrees of grey. My camera conceit is so complete that it never occurred to me to put it on automatic and let it do its thing. I cannot possibly do as well myself with settings as the camera can do in such an odd light situation as this. The camera always reliably takes better photos of clouds than I do. But the whole day I never thought of setting it to automatic. The camera would have done much better with this rainbow. It was more distinct than this. And a full-size camera would have worked even better with this lens made to fit, it is less effective on my regular 3/4 size camera.

The rainbow seemed to contain the barn. A seventy-year old man whispered in a wonder-struck voice of a child, "I've never been this close to one."