For some unknown reason, this year, the rose plants in my garden decided to bloom like crazy. For a few weeks now it has been white and red roses everywhere. Here is one of them

I’ve nothing much to say about this except that I wish I had taken some care to prevent flare.

I was in Heidelberg over the weekend and got back with tons of photos. But until I process them here is another macro to keep you occupied!

As I mentioned yesterday, I did get to shoot later in the evening. In fact, I ended up shooting a lot! Here is the first one. More to follow over the next few days. The locations for the shoot were some barley and wheat fields near the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding, which is slightly outside Cologne.

Another macro of the flower. Somehow I’m not very satisfied with this photo but I decided to post it anyway as I like the way the light is reflected in the droplet.

Another shot of the hibiscus-like flower from yesterday. For the first time after buying it, the versatile nature of my tripod came in handy while taking this (and subsequent) shot(s). Actually, this was shot hand-held and not using a tripod!

Let us leave the world of monochrome for a moment and enjoy the world of color once more! Here is a macro of a flower from my garden, which actually is beginning to resemble a tropical jungle these days! I managed to a get quite a few shots I liked from these flowers so you can expect to see more of these over the next few days. I’m not very good with flower names but this seems to be a variant of the hibiscus.

Here is something from my garden. It comes from a weed which grows everywhere here and has these puffy, very delicate feather-like balls at the tip of their stems. No idea what they are called though. Does anyone know?

Again, let us take a break from Vienna for a couple of photos I shot in my garden this morning. I’ll be posting a monochrome version of this leaf from a slightly different angle tomorrow.

Another macro of the flowers from yesterday. It was a pain trying to focus the stamen (or is it anther?), ended up with some nice back pain.

Moving onto other stuff, the 2006 photobloggies opened for nominations today. You can nominate your favorite photoblogs under various categories [here](http://2006.photobloggies.org/).