There are some really great flower beds at Glen Echo, and the US Park Service does a terrific job of maintaining them. While waiting around for my student to arrive, I wandered about and took some close-up shots of the cone flowers and Black-Eyed Susans.

These were all shot with my regular 50mm f1.4 lens on my Canon 5D, not a special macro lens. I’m impressed with the close-focus capability, considering it ISN’T a macro lens. But I would love to try one of the L-series tele-macros for doing insects and the like. Bees get rather skittish, as do butterflies.

Zooming out, metaphorically speaking, here are some shots of the buildings around Glen Echo, which you’ve seen variations of before here on my blog.

The light was changing as my student and I were out for him to take photos with his 8×10 to use as practice negatives for platinum/palladium printing. While he was shooting his 8×10, I had the Canon with me and caught the Popcorn sign and the reflections on the windows of the carousel as the light was dropping and the neon came on.

The bridge that leads over the stream to the parking lot had beautiful slanting sidelight on it, and framed these two people perfectly, casting long shadows.

This is what I saw on my way out, after class was all done and I was walking back to the car. The Glen Echo sign is particularly magnificent and at the same time haunting after dark, because of the emptiness, especially on a weeknight.