I visited an old friend in my hometown a week ago and wanted to show her my blog while I was there, so we got on her computer and wound up here O.K. but the photos from my last post about the Pacific Rim Bonsai Collection were super slow to appear and when I tried clicking on them to get them out of the cropped version seen on the blog page, it took forever! I received a tip from a fellow blogster to load smaller images to alleviate the problem. So, this post is an experiment with that and also an opportunity to show some photos from a year ago when the light was right.

The first photo is one I took in the little town of Clackamas, Oregon, and is within walking distance of my house here in Milwaukie. It’s part of my route I walk several times a month to the little Post Office in Clackamas to get two things accomplished–a brisk walk combined with dropping my bills directly off at the Post Office. The shot is taken at a busy intersection; 82nd Avenue and highway 224 that goes to Estacada, Oregon and this road also takes you to Mount Hood, which is oddly framed by this urban sprawl. I’m curious how this will work out, so here goes:

 

Okay! It worked! The image fits in the blog page without being cropped! It’s smaller but all you have to do is click on the image and the page opens with a larger photo…try it

And from that same file from last fall I have a shot of a Japanese Mountain Maple forest of fourteen trees–all cuttings I struck over the years from 2003 to 2007 from the same mother tree. So they are all clones all with the same characteristics of the mother–leaf size and color, branching, internodes, bark, etc. The forest is planted in a redwood box I made for a collected manzanita that is now in its second incarnation. That box was built in 2004, 8 years ago and is holding up like a champ 😉 It could almost serve as the container for this forest, but I’ve got my antennae out for a nice pot for this forest. Maybe a shallow green oval? Let’s take a look:

 

I like this shot because of the way it was backlit so the trunks can be seen. It’s hard to get a good photo of this forest because it’s so heavy to move. I waited a long time for the moment when the light was just right to get this shot. Sure would like to see it in a bonsai pot some day…It will be a large pot as the length of the box is over 3 feet, just about a meter. I truly hope this helps my friend to view my blog easier as this is what it’s mostly about–images. And if we’re not careful the files can take up a lot of space in our computers. Please let me know if this works better for you or if I should shrink the images a bit more. Thanks for looking!