These dwarf reticulated irises were an impulse buy from a big box store back in the fall of 2016, I believe. Ever since, they’ve been the first pop of color in the Early Spring Border in February or March.
Granted, they don’t deal as well with the March and April snows as their later-blooming neighbors — muscari, hyacinth, daffodils, brunnera — but I welcome their early flash of color every spring, even if it’s brief.
This was the view on Friday evening, while we waited in the car for our Fun Friday pizza.
The first weekend in June 2020, our family hit up a neighborhood garage sale, and my son (age 8 at the time) “borrowed” 50 cents to buy this camera.
Appropriately enough, the Vivitar cv35 was marketed as “an ideal first camera for young people and beginning photographers.” If he hadn’t seen it first, I might have bought it myself, though; I’m a sucker for trashcams and toy cameras.
Its main distinguishing features on the surface are its translucent body, a built-in sliding lens cover, and a flash powered by one AA battery. However, it also has a two-element lens, which is a step up from most cheap plastic cameras from the 90’s. Cameras like this can produce unique results with vignetting and sketchy focus, so I was eager to load it up and take it for a spin.
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Connor has been making line art lately, so I showed him how I used to do mine back in the day. Once he saw the one corner, he asked if I could make an entire square like that. When I finished drawing the third corner, he said that it looked like a comet warping the fabric of space-time, and wanted me to draw that.
So, I guess you could say this is a collaborative piece.
I glanced in the rear-view mirror as we pulled up to the stoplight, and had to grab my phone out of its dashboard mount to capture this slice of life.