Don's View

Umauma Falls

Not far south of Hilo on the east coast of Hawaii, a modest but attractive World Botanical Gardens provides access to one of Hawaii's triple tier waterfalls, the 300-foot Umauma. A visit to the Gardens, the waterfall, and a nearby rain forest will occupy a pleasant afternoon.

Beyond the Umauma turn off but also south of Hilo is the impressive Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden.


Other Hawaii scenes can be viewed at donvineimages.com

Geoffery

One disadvantage to being the tallest animal on the planet is the risk of lightning strikes. Seems that giraffe that live in zoos are sometimes the tallest thing in the park and are hit. In their normally arid habitats, lightning is infrequent and Acacia trees on which giraffe feed are taller than they are.

The long neck requires a 20 pound heart to get the blood to the tips of the horns that crown both male and female animals. It also means each mouthfull of food makes several long trips between the mouth and stomach to be processed as cud as with ruminants having shorter necks.

The giraffe here lives at the Sedgewick County Zoo near Wichita, Kansas. Others can be viewed at don vine animal images

Labels: animals, giraffe

Corcoran Men's Lavatory


The Cocoran Gallery of Art, the oldest in Washington DC, recently featured the photography of Annie Leibovitz and Ansel Adams.

Leibovitz, a lifetime photographer of people, both family and famous, is perhaps most popularly known for her nude portrait of pregnant Demi Moore published on the August 1999 Vanity Fair magazine cover.

In contrast to Leibovitz' color portraits of people, Adams was a master of black-and-white landscape and archetectual photography. The Corcoran's posthumous retrospective of his work conveys the growth to mastery of Adams' photographic skill.

The Corcoran Gallery was founded in 1869. I don't know when the mens' room was built, but it is old enough to have been called a lavatory. The natural lighting, wood panels, and black and white of tile and fixtures presented the semblance of an old sepia toned photograph even before the picture was taken. The mood had been set by the featured shows, and so I captured the image.

Labels: Corcoran Gallery, mens lavatory