The Zen Garden at Bellagio

Picture Notes: In May of 2009, Connie and I made a trek to the Conservatory and Botanical Gardens inside the Bellagio Casino, one of our favorite places to visit on the Strip. Brilliance abounds inside this breathtaking botanical garden. The attention to detail is astounding. Four times a year, you get to admire the essence of every season recreated with exceptionally gorgeous plants, flowers and trees thoughtfully arranged to inspire full splendor. Specially designed lighting spotlights every flower to accentuate its best features. To ensure that this marvelous garden maintains its magnificence 365 days a year, a staff of 140 expert horticulturists theatrically arrange gazebos, bridges, ponds, and water features uniquely for each season. This theme for this Spring's exhibit was a Zen garden which featured a walk-thru butterfly house. It was absolutely stunning.

Rockface

This picture was taken on 05/02/2009 at Bellagio’s Conservatory and Botanical Garden.

The Zen Garden

This picture was taken on 05/02/2009 at Bellagio’s Conservatory and Botanical Garden.

Water Reflections

These shots were taken at the Spring 2009 exhibit entitled, “Gardens From Around the World”, at the Conservatory & Botanical Gardens inside the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas. There were several fascinating displays that consisted of water flowing out of the top of hollow glass globes. I took several pictures from varying positions in order to get different reflections on the water flowing over the globes. After using Paint Shop Pro to clean up and color enhance some of the shots, I then used Scrapbook Factory Deluxe to crop just the globe portion of the photo onto a black background. Adjusted their size and arranged for a look of depth. After grouping and enlarging I then exported the file as a .JPG.

Daffodil - Narcissus

As the first flower of spring, the daffodil is a symbol of hope. They often symbolize friendship, and are one of the most popular flowers exclusively due to their unmatched beauty. Daffodils belong to the genus Narcissus. Narcissus is the Latin or botanical name for all daffodils. Daffodil flowers have a beautiful trumpet-shaped structure set against a star-shaped background. Back on 04/19/2009 I was going through some old flower pictures and found a picture (below) of a daffodil I had taken back before 2003 when we were living in Greenland. To create the above picture I first cropped the original shot down to just the head of the Daffodil. I then adjusted the Hue of the original picture six times using Paint Shop Pro Photo Ultimate X2. Lastly, I used my Scrapbook Factory Deluxe program to stitch together and flip the individual pictures to create the final image, saving it to a JPG file.