Real Creature's Creations: La Mesa Near the Secret Stairs

Whenever I can, I take my small "Canon PowerShot SX100 IS" digital camera with its 10X Optical Zoom along with me on the morning walks I take in La Mesa. It's a pretty old camera, and I'm a pretty old human being. I kind of wish I were the camera - it's really holding up and it's revealing a lot of surprises for me. Whereas, I'm pretty sure I know almost everything about myself, and I'm kind of falling apart.

The MACRO setting on this camera is truly amazing. This flower is part of a very small bunch, less than an inch in diameter, and there are dozens of bunches per flowering branch. I love that there is such a wide variety of flowers and succulents spread all through this area.

It's already the latter part of Spring and so many of the flowers are beginning to lose their luster. I can only walk a few times per week since my body has gone through so many days since I was born, approximately 23,360 days as of June 1. The last few thousand days have been very depressing and enlightening at the same time. More depressing than enlightening, but ... like these flowers, I feel I am losing my luster.

This closeup reveals the complexity of the reproductive molecular processes always at work within each flower.

The Calla lily is notorious for displaying its full bloom and readiness for reproduction. Get it? It appears to be beckoning the bees.

There are many unique flowers all along my walk, and so I'm constantly stopping to take these photographs. I usually take a few with the AUTO setting and these closeups come out nicely when I use the MACRO-VEGETATION setting, but I take several using the MACRO settiing with AUTO on the top dial just to compare them later. The VEGETATION setting is found under the SCN setting on the top dial. I never knew this camera had so many settings that make adjustments to the photos while you take them.