Zoo Blooms

As i begin to turn my attention towards departing Cincinnati and moving my personal world to Nova Scotia i can't help but take note of what a truly great city this is and what i will be leaving behind when i finally go. If you have been a follower of this blog in any regular fashion you must know that moving to Nova Scotia has been a longtime dream of mine that should come with no regrets, but that is not to say that i don't fully appreciate the place in which i currently live that i have called my home for almost 20 years now. There will certainly be things i will miss about Cincinnati.
Amongst the most awesome things this city has to offer is the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens. The zoo host many wonderful social events along with it's regular zoological programs and one that i really love attending is a concert series called Tunes & Blooms which takes place every spring when they also present Zoo Blooms, a focus on the botanical part of their name. The zoo becomes a riot of color, mostly thanks to a large display of tulips across large parts of the grounds. Yesterday i got to shoot Tunes & Blooms once again for the local paper, but it would be foolish of me to place all my attention on the musicians and audience and not take at least a few moments to stop and photograph the flowers on such a beautiful spring evening.

(please click on images for an enlarged gallery view)

This last image isn't actually a part of Zoo Blooms. As i was about to exit the zoo i came across this stand of redbuds. I had never encountered this tree before coming to Ohio, with its brilliant purple flowers that pop with color every spring and demand your attention whenever even your peripheral vision catches sight of them. Just one more thing i will miss about this region once i have left it...