Red flowering gum at Pingelly
I am just going through cleaning up some of my memory sticks and I came across some pictures I took of a young red flowering gum tree at Pingelly.
According to the EXIF data (don’t you just love how all digital images are imprinted with the date and time they were taken in the embedded EXIF data?) this was taken back on the 18th February 2012 at 15:43:36 (about a quarter to four in the afternoon).
I remember taking these. On the way through Pingelly on the way to Popanyinning—where I visit an old friend from time to time—I saw this young red flowering gum. It was about 1.5 metres high on the right hand side of the road in front of a workshop or garage of some kind.
I have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of red flowering gum trees. Part of Kalamunda Road going past the golf grounds is lined with them. But this little tree was especially striking. The red from the flowers looked like they were red LED lights on full power. They shone. They were so bright. So I made a mental note to take a couple of pictures on the way back.
Now I often do this—make mental notes to myself about pictures I plan to take—but then I never actually do stop on the way back and take the pictures I told myself I would. But this time I did.
As is my usual practice now you can click on the first picture below (as it is the ‘feature’ picture) to open an 1800 pixel wide version from the Abalook SmugMug site.
The above picture has been cropped down from the following original picture to get rid of some of the green leaves.
Now I just want to zoom into that bee in the flower a bit left of centre. Following is a 1:1 pixel crop of the flower with the bee in it.
This is the Pentax K-5 with the 18 – 135 Pentax DA lens at 115 mm on ISO 200, f6.3 at 1/1000th of a second. Is this frigging amazing or what? From the picture above to this!
And how bright is the red on that flowering gum. Maybe I should get one and plant it in my yard somewhere. But when you buy them you are never too sure just how ‘red’ your ‘red’ flowing gum is going to be.
Indecently, I did not notice the red flowing gums around Kalamunda flowering this year. It is not as though you can miss them when they do flower. Maybe I just didn’t go to the right places when they were flowering.
