It wasn't a very pretty day unfortunately, but the view must be just incredible when it's sunny. I loved this shady sideyard with a view of Castine Harbor, too: 
I'm so excited because my image, Reflection, made the cover of Portland Magazine this month (August 2008!) I also have a landscape-oriented lighthouse image gracing the heading of their big article, Maine Classics of the 21st Century! 
Painted Ladies, I think. . .
Mom and I went to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Harbor, Maine on Saturday, July 12, 2008. First, we had a trip to a wonderful pottery school called Watershed, in Edgecomb, where we attended a benefit lunch called salad days, where you could buy an amazing handmade plate by an artist and then have a delicious, homecooked and put together buffet lunch of salads and side dishes. 
There was an English Cottage-style garden, which was really cheery. . .
There was also a beautiful water garden, where I saw these amazingly deep-pink water lilies. I could hear frogs croaking and leaping around, but I never saw one because there were these two little girls who were trying to catch them!
I also loved the fairy house woods, where I found this lovely little rock sculpture sitting on a boulder with the nicely blurred background of the evergreens.
And just as I was lining up the shot to take this beautiful clump of lavender, this bumblebee ambled in and landed on one of the flowers. 
We had a great time on 4th of July, watching the fireworks with my cousin and her family. I set up my tripod and used my Pentax 50-200 mm zoom at 200 mm. I set up the focus before it got entirely dark and set the camera on manual focus so I wouldn't lose it. Then when the fireworks started, I tried a few different exposure times, but settled on the best being 8 seconds at f/11, ISO 100. I have wanted to try photographing fireworks for a while, but rain always interceded before this year! 
This is Maya and her cousin, embracing the beautiful sunset:
And here, at last, is the sunset itself, zoomed up on at 200 mm, looking out across St. Eiboh's Cove to the opposite shore:
I hope everyone else had a lovely fourth of July weekend!
The Black Boat, Bernard, Maine, Mt. Desert Island. . .
Main Street, Bar Harbor, with streaming car headlights and people milling around stores. . .
The first day, we set up our tent and then headed out to Bass Harbor, to see the beautiful Bass Harbor Headlight. This is one of the most-often photographed lighthouses in America, but you generally see sunrise views of it because of its East-facing nature. Of course, there was no sun in evidence, so I focused more on the beauty of the pink granite rocks, leaving the lighthouse shrouded in fog in the background:
We spent the Summer Solstice Sunset on Cadillac Mountain:
And one of the rare times we had sun, we went to Jordan Pond. In the distance, across the pond, is a view of the twin mountains called "the bubbles."
And after that, since it was still sunny, we headed to the Asticou Inn's famous Thuja Azalea Garden, which is a traditional Japanese Garden. This is a little zen nook I liked, but it was too bright a day for good photos of anything but dappled shade:
I got a couple of interesting shots in Bar Harbor--this is the historic resort, the Bar Harbor Motor Inn, which sits right on the Shore Path, a lovely place to take a walk and see the huge mansions from Bar Harbor's glory days in the late 1800s and early 1900s:
And we raced out early (4:00 am) one of the last mornings we were there to capture "sunrise" in Bar Harbor, because a magazine, Maine Food & Lifestyle, had expressed interest in a couple of shots of Bar Harbor from me. This is about the best of what I got, as you can see! 
So I was really only very happy with one photo (the blue lobster bots at the beginning of the post) but we had a wonderful vacation together and got to revisit our old haunts, as we lived there together back in 1991 when we were getting to know each other as a young couple. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. I certainly enjoyed taking them!
