May Gray slides into June Gloom..What a month its been, will save you the boring details but the short of it is I was swamped the last few weeks of May. Just as well as May was a lot grayer than usual and June is keeping true to form as well. The 'puter is back up and running (2 Gigs of RAM now to better handle the HDR stuff) and picked up an interesting sidebar activity as a writer on blogging.la

Anyway today I finally got my self out of the house and ventured out to the San Gabriel River along the bike paths in Duarte and Irwindale. Nice place to hang even if the river has been turned off for 8 months already.

This spring was so dry that there is virtually nothing blooming. Even the cacti are barely going this year. Not even the usual gaggle of geese and duckies around as everything is baked dry.

What was blooming was some of the Century Plants, members of the aloe and agave family, but you can't make tequila or anything good from them, they just look cool. Interesting plant, kind of like a spiky leaved palm at ground level and at the end of its life it sends up this 12-15 foot tall flower spike. After the bloom is done it dies and as it rots provides nutrients for the seedlings that will come in subsequent years.

Today's pic is one of those flower spikes, all fluffy and soft. I did a little color correcting after converting it from raw to tiff. Then I ran it through the virtual photographer to give it more of an old timey slide look (Sorry no HDR this time around). For you technical types I shot it RAW with the EOS20d, no noise suppression on. Shot it with my trusty 28-200mm zoom at the 28mm focal length, ISO 400 at f8 at 1/1250 second.