Friday Fabulous Flower - Rose mallow

All the locals say today is Saturday, but it still doesn’t seem right to the Phactor, and it's still Friday back home. Not only that but posting a flower from the gardens at home, albeit a very showy flower, one that opened on the very morning of our departure, just doesn’t seem right. But for now it will have to do. The weather in Sydney is not conducive for botanizing or any form of out of door activities (wettest July in over 60 years). So you make do with what you have, and what we have is a rose mallow, which has the largest diameter flower in our garden (~9 inches). Even better the Japanese beetles who dearly love mallows are not nearly the menace this year as last. Now what is significant is that this is the very first picture taken with a brand spanking new Nikon Coolpix P7000 camera, which is a compact camera for serious photographers. For a couple of decades the Phactor lugged around a gadget bag with two camera backs and several lens, and for all that effort a very good picture every now and again. And people had their instamatic cameras, handy, convenient, but you couldn’t bring yourself to stoop that low, but digital cameras changed the game. This is a very serious camera not to be recommended to anyone who isn’t a serious photographer because in a standard automatic mode many other simpler, easier cameras can do as well, but what this camera can do in addition is awesome. At present the Phactor is only half way through the instruction manual and that’s after a trans-Pacific flight with lots of time to spend, and sometime during the instructions for using the white balance feature, the brain shut down. And none of this has much to do with a rose mallow. This is not actually a FFF repeat, although it's wild relative was used for a post last summer. This is a cultivar that comes in a variety of colors with a bit larger flower than the wild species.