For several years now, every year on Chinese Lunar New Year, Oakland has hosted a Chinese Lantern Festival. Although I would call these glowing sculptures 🙂 for they are very large for flashlights. Several hundred glowing figurines were collected in Oakland's Domein Park (more than 800 according to official records). Some were funny, some were more or less gaunt 🙂 Besides the lanterns, the trees lit up with different colors looked cool.

I don't know how to translate water garden, something like a garden with a pond... A place with the Maori name Ngatea has a very famous garden. It is known not only for the fact that there is a lot of vegetation, but also for the unbridled sense of humor of its owners, which spills out in unexpected installations and compositions. It rained very luckily while fording and produced lots of colors with droplets.

On New Year's Eve I unexpectedly got a real macro lens - Tokina Macro 100mm\2.8 and decided to go to the botanical garden to take pictures, because I had been there several times, but without a camera. In practice, macro turned out to be not so easy and about 70% of the footage flew into the trash because of shakiness. The shutter speed of 1\320 was sometimes not enough because the photographer wobbles, the flower wobbles, the bumblebee moves... aaaaaaah. In general, as experienced people say, a stabelizer on macro lenses is useless because the world around you is constantly moving. Below are 40 shots of what didn't move much.