What the lens reveals

A  very strange and unfamiliar thing happened in my neck of the woods yesterday.

It rained.

This is a thing to celebrate, big time. But I was kicking myself for not taking pictures of the tree blossoms yesterday. Or any day over the last couple weeks since they first appeared.

As I neared the house after driving home from the dentist, a little sun filtered through a thin patch in the clouds making the blossoms on our neighbors’ trees glow. I was surprised by the beauty of the combination light! I parked, dashed inside to get the camera and came back out, stopping to photograph some tangerines:

The delay cost. The light flattened out again as the cloud cover increased. I’d missed the shot.

This disappointment led me to try something new, however– a macro of a branch from a different tree, using the blossoms as a background. Rain drizzled all around my shoulders and droplets marred my lens, but when this photo opened on my computer, I found the lens had captured the very sunlight I craved, glowing off that branch.

The sun is back out this morning! I went out to get you an update and caught a rainbow. I wouldn’t have even noticed it if I hadn’t been trying to catch the trees in the sunlight. I saw it through the camera lens. Needless to say, I shifted focus to capture the rainbow.

You can see a lot of the blossoms fell off the tree. This is what happens to our cherries every year. We get really excited about zillions of cherry blossoms and then it rains and we get about 50 cherries, which the birds eat before they are ripe. One year and one year only, we had hundreds of cherries. I’ll never forget that crop!

I’m not sure what kind of trees these are, but the blossoms remaining after the hard rain are lovely in the fresh washed sunlight.