Saturday, June 21, 2008 – In Lotus Land

The first day of summer out here – in the high nineties in the shade long before noon, and getting hotter by the minute – traffic lights failing, people getting angry, or locked in at home with the air-conditioning cranked up.  Will Rogers Memorial Park on Sunset, in the middle of Beverly Hills, with its lily pond, was empty. Only madmen were out it the heat. But it was the Zen place to be.  It was the lotus is the pond – water lily to some – Nymphaea, a genus of aquatic plants in the family Nymphaeaceae. It's a lotus pond – very calming.  There are about fifty species in the genus.  A few of them were here, in the heat.

Above the lotus, Magnolia grandiflora –

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Technical Note:

Photographs after March 3, 2008, were taken with a Nikon D200 – or a Nikon D70 when noted. All previous photographs were taken with the D70. The lenses used are (1) AF-S Nikkor 18-70 mm 1:35-4.5G ED, or (2) AF Nikkor 70-300 mm telephoto, or (3) AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 55-200 mm f/4-5.6G ED. Photography here is modified for web posting using Adobe Photoshop 7.0.  The earliest photography in the archives was done with a Sony Mavica digital still camera (MVC-FD-88) with built-in digital zoom.

All text and photos, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik