These are the first pictures I took with my camera - a Kodak Z740 - which I got last year. I got the camera because it has a 10x optical zoom - so I can take close ups of nature and of people. This was a flowering tree in the garden behind our building, Akasya Apt., at a compound called Kortel Korusu, above the village of Arnavutkoy, in Istanbul.

Arnavutkoy is one of the villages along the jewel of Istanbul: the Bosphorus.

We don't have a sea view - because our building is not at the crest of the hill overlooking the Bosphorus. A sprawling house and compound walled in by red brick is. But where we are we are guarded by some very big and very old acacia trees. I will take a picture of those trees sometime...

......all sorts of birds come and rest or make their home on the trees, and every morning, almost every season, it seems, we wake up to birdsong.