Blog

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Last weekend, our friend Katy Maziarz went on a photo walk with her husband and friend in the Chicago area. She chronicled the day using new Impossible PX 70 Color Protection film…

It was a small group; there were just three of us in total: me, my husband CJ (a Pola newbie) and Justin Hunger. We went to the Chicago Botanic Garden on our walk. The Garden is 385 acres, with 25 distinct display garden areas, four “natural” areas, and several small lakes and waterfalls. So as you can imagine, there’s a lot to see and a lot to photograph, and it’s almost impossible to do the entire Garden in one trip.

We started off in the Heritage Garden, which is dedicated to the history of botanic gardens and has some very interesting fountains—and a statue of Carolus Linnaeus, known as the Father of Taxonomy. But we were more interested in the bountiful blossoms. Justin Hunger got some use out of his brand-new-to-him Macro 5 camera, as you can see in one of the photos posted!

From there, we moved through the Rose Garden and into one of my favorite gardens in the place, the English Walled Garden. Just as it sounds, this is a charming, quiet old-fashioned garden in which you can imagine young ladies strolling with their beaus, a stern-eyed chaperone somewhere behind. There’s a lovely bright blue bench which is our favorite place to sit.

We crossed up and over the Dwarf Conifer Garden, stopping to take the portrait of a very noisy grasshopper – I was glad I had my SX-70 close-up filter for a lot of shots yesterday, but especially that one! – and then into the Japanese Garden. The Japanese Garden, called Sansho-En, sprawls across three islands and consists mostly of intricately clipped pines, weeping willows trailing their leaves into koi-inhabited water, and Japanese-style lanterns tucked in among the foliage. The dominant color is green green green! We all took quite a few pictures here.

By this time, we were tired and running low on film, but still managed to hit the Enabling Garden with all its color and sound, the Bulb Garden, the Fruit and Vegetable Garden (Justin ate a grape!) and back around to the Esplanade and back to the entrance. It was quite fun, and perfect weather! We didn’t manage to get any photos of the abundant hummingbirds, but I did catch a bee!

All the photos were shot with the new PX 70 Color Protection film and none were shielded, but all were developed in the dark….direct sunlight is still a little much for the film, it seems…but anything taken in bright shade was perfect.

Want to go on a photo walk yourself? Coming up, there will be a Dallas Photo Walk and a Washington, DC Photo Walk, both on Saturday, September 29th!