Capitol Silhouette

Capitol Silhouette © 2010 Bo Mackison

Capitol Silhouette © 2010 Bo Mackison

New news from Seeded Earth Studio!  I have recently taken official steps to branch my photography into two directions.

I shoot a lot of nature and landscape photography, and these photographs will continue to appear (almost daily) on the Seeded Earth blog.

But I also have a passion for visiting and photographing historical places, and I’ve recently started a new website and blog which focuses on this genre of photographs. The new site is called, quite originally, Historic Places Photography. I feature a historic building (for now, mostly from Wisconsin, Illinois, and Arizona) two to three times a week.

I intend, in the future, to offer architectural photography to the dedicated people who undertake restorations of historical properties, and also to provide downloadable walking tours featuring photographs and information on the architecture of historic buildings in smaller cities and towns throughout the Midwest.

For now, I hope you’ll visit Historic Places Photography and check out the photography.

Purple Blaze

Purple Blaze © 2010 Bo Mackison

Purple Blaze © 2010 Bo Mackison

Spending the day in hospital waiting rooms while a loved one has surgery. Not serious — a cranky knee with a few torn bits that needs some repair. Wish us luck!

Dogwood Branch

Dogwood Branch © 2010 Bo Mackison

Dogwood Branch © 2010 Bo Mackison

Nothing in nature quite persuades me it is spring again like the lovely dogwood. Dogwoods don’t grow in Wisconsin. (We do have particularly lovely crab apple blossoms in our clime, but the crab apple spring show is still a few weeks away.)

These particular dogwoods are from my hometown in western Illinois, where the trees are dotted throughout every neighborhood, and many of the trees are now beginning to flower. Always a lovely sight.

White Dogwood Blossoms

White Dogwood © 2010 Bo Mackison

White Dogwood © 2010 Bo Mackison

These Dogwood blossoms were dressed in their Sunday best, and showing off their beauty in a tiny landscaped area in front of a century old church. Most everyone was inside the building, dressed in their Sunday morning finery, but I was outside in the warm sunshine, preferring to examine and photograph a bit of nature’s fleeting beauty.

The blossoms were such a soft creamy color and had bits of feathery plum accents on each bract (the part that looks like a petal). I could have looked at the blossoms for hours. See the tiny circular area that almost looks like a tiny eye? Reminds me of the “false eyes” that some butterflies have on their wings as defensive adaptations. And notice how the dogwood blossoms are in layers, facing towards the sun–getting their full share of sunshine? I love that.

These white parts of the dogwood are really a modified type of leaf. The flowers of the dogwood are the little green bits in the center — the flowering head.

This dogwood was photographed in Quincy, Illinois, nicknamed the Dogwood City because it has an unusually large number of both pink and white dogwood trees. There is an annual Dogwood Festival and Parade in the city, held the first weekend in May.

(This festivities for this year are scheduled for April 30 – May 2, but it appears the party will go on without the dogwoods in bloom. Peak will be in 7 to 10 days, I’m thinking.)

Teal Pond in Early Spring

Teal Pond  © 2010 Bo Mackison

Teal Pond © 2010 Bo Mackison

On our evening walk through the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, we didn’t see much in the way of green, but the skies were quite blue, and the pond provided a lovely reflection of early springtime.