Actually, it has lots of red flowers later on, once the daylilies and monarda get going, but spring tends to be dominated by white, yellow and especially purple.

And to be honest wild ginger^[1] also falls into that brownish red category...hmmm.

Red sweetshrub. The image has been cropped and lightened. Taken on, um, the 26? may.

Sweetshrubs are not especially exciting in terms of shape, either overall or the plain oval leaves, but it is pretty cool the way the flowers are attracting bugs—there were three of them clustered around just while I was taking the picture.

Taken in the evening of 29th may. Cropped and color corrections in the green and blue channels.

The original of this clematis image was a tad on the yellow side, because though the settable white balance works great with the photofloods (which to be honest is far more important to me) it sometimes is really off when trying to adjust the color in the beginning or end of the day (the default ‘sunny’ is for noon, so that isn't ideal either). The first time I tried balancing the color, I gave up in frustration, but that was probably because I attempted to do this with the adjust color balance tool. This time, I used the curves tool, which I have used for years to adjust value (as I did for the sweetshrub picture, above), except I chose the green and blue channels instead of the value channel.

Wow, it worked great, though the picture is still on the yellow side (this being the first time I've successfully done this, I was on the conservative side.) Much more intuitive to bend a line into a curve, than click on check boxes and sliders (in fact, a lot of my problem was that it probably didn't occur to me to start with the highlights, rather than the mid-tones—almost all of my post-processing tends to be in the highlights. It's pretty straightfoward, really. Not a Real Photographer, here...)

Frankly, this page is more to let me know when this stuff blooms than any other reason: sweetshrub and clematis, about the same time as bearded iris. Ok, then.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.