According to a Naples zoo keeper, female giraffes live together in herds. The male giraffes leave at puberty, live on their own and visit the females when they want some lovin’.
On a warm afternoon the giraffes took their turn eating endive right from the hands of visitors. A young girl shyly offered a giraffe a treat while her mom enthusiastically took photos, blocking a good shot, but definitely made a good memory.
One giraffe was 16 feet tall. The protrusions from their heads are not horns, but rather knobs to protect their heads. I was impressed how gently and languidly they moved. They enjoyed a shower from a hose. One rubbed the back of her head against a tree branch.
Notice how long and dextrous their tongues are! What a treat to have a telephoto lens and have the viewing stand so close to these beautiful creatures!
For all the creative problem solvers in the world, In What Ways Can We Help the Ukrainian People Thrive Again?
The flowers are quite small, so I used a macro lens to get very close and fill the frame. Usually I take a series of 10 to 15 images and stack them together in Photoshop. If there is any movement during the series, they won’t align and make ghost images, which is interesting in the abstract, but makes it hard to see the details. These live in the greenhouse and bloomed in mid-February.
My maternal grandmother’s sister gave this cactus to her in the mid 1930s. My grandmother gave this cactus to me in 1981. It has moved with us from Michigan to Atlanta to New York back to Georgia and now to Florida. I have pruned and propagated it many times to share its beauty. I used to call it my Christmas cactus, but now I have a different species that blooms at Christmas and this one blooms later, so I have renamed it my New Year’s cactus. This is the first bloom of the season. Rather than a side view, I decided to make the photos lying on my back looking up towards the sun to see inside and through the petals. I played with the backgrounds to give it a variety of moods.
On September 20, 2015 I paid my respects at 9/11 ground zero for the second time. The first time was in November of 2001. So much had changed. Instead of rubble surrounded by fencing and personal memorials, there was a museum and waterfalls into pools on the footprint of the twin towers with names inscribed of those who died in the buildings and the first responders. There was a sculpture that looked like bird wings and a new tower. Many visitors quietly walked the site, paying respects, grieving.
I created these montages as my memorial. Can you see the ghosts? I call it Freedom Rising. Many years earlier I worked for American Express and went through or by the World Trade Towers on my way to work at the Financial Center. During the first underground attack of the World Trade Center I was working for Genlyte in Secaucus, New Jersey and could see the plumes of smoke from my office window.
I have great difficulty in understanding the hatred that motivates humans to hurt and kill one another, again and again and again. But I know that we must not be defeated by hatred. This is why I call my memorial Freedom Rising. We do not forget, but we use it as a way to contrast our love, optimism, and courage to build again, to soar like the phoenix from the ashes, and thank those who give of themselves to protect our freedom.