Happily married 55 years, retired baby boomer, mother of 2, grandmother of 4, traveler, Georgia Bulldog fan, Air Force Brat, avid reader, amateur photographer, gardener, ovarian cancer survivor, blogger. Every day is a gift!
I planted two new new camellias last weekend. Even though it’s been raining every day since then I have managed to go check them out every day between showers. I’m hoping there will continue to be new blooms in the garden for awhile.
The following two images and the image above are from my garden last year and this year.
My interest in camellias began when I went for a tour of the camellias in Bonaventure Cemetery with a group of ladies in my local garden club two years ago. This plant covered with rosy red camellias was one of my favorites from that day.
As you walk along some of the beaches on Georgia’s barrier islands you may come across driftwood from dead trees. Sometimes you may even find an entire tree that has fallen.
In October 2016, Category 2 Hurricane Matthew was offshore in the Atlantic Ocean when it passed by close to where we live in Coastal Georgia. When we returned home after evacuating I witnessed first hand just how powerful the storm was. Massive old oaks and pines had fallen all around our neighborhood, blocking roads and driveways. In some cases the tree just barely missed landing on a house.
For this challenge Tina has asked us to demonstrate how we use editing to improve an image. This was a fun challenge that took me out of my comfort zone. Usually, I crop the photo and I’m done. For this challenge I experimented with a few other editing techniques using Photoshop Elements.
The camellias are blooming and I’ve been trying to get a perfect shot of them. To focus on the flower I cropped this original into a square and applied the Watercolor effect. The finished image below shows the details of the flower and the rain drops on the petals.
On the left is the original of a Great White Egret in the salt marsh. I wanted a close up of the Egret so I cropped it before adding the Rough Pastels effect.
This last image was taken in Denali National Park in Alaska on a cloudy, overcast day. I replaced the dull sky with a brilliant blue sky to add more color and enhance the image.
I am not a professional photographer. Photography is something I do for fun and I enjoy sharing my photos here on my blog.
I had so much fun getting out my old cameras and going through old photo albums for this challenge. My husband has an old video camera that’s been in a closet for a long time so while I was working on this post he was going through his videos. I would have had this post done yesterday but I am easily distracted and got side tracked watching some of his videos!
Some of my old cameras
I began my photography journey as a kid in elementary school with a Brownie camera. My pictures were pretty bad but it’s fun to look back on them now. I can still remember taking the film to be developed and impatiently waiting to see how the pictures turned out. The first animal picture I can find is of our pet turtles lined up on the sidewalk in front of our house.
Unedited photo of my pet turtles
When we started scuba diving in the late 1980’s I became interested in under water photography. I would just aim the camera in the general direction of whatever I was trying to get a picture of. After many epic fails and lots of wasted film I finally gave up and just enjoyed the diving. Occasionally, I actually captured the fish but they were usually out of focus. Here are a few that kind of turned out. These are cropped and edited to bring out the colors.
Back on land I had better luck with landscapes. Two of my favorite landscapes were shot with the two old Sony Cypershots. At the top of the page is a landscape from Oahu in Hawaii and the image below is of the Pitons in St. Lucia.
I got interested in wildlife and bird photography after we began traveling in the RV. I managed to get a few decent shots with the Cybershot if the subject was pretty close to me.
Bison in Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming)Elk in Yellowstone National Park (Woming)
A few years later I graduated to a Sony DSLR with a zoom lens after I tried in vain to get a close up shot of a pair of eagles on one of our trips. This was as close as I could get with my old Cybershot.
Pair of American Bald Eagles in south Florida
The next year Henry got me a Sony A550 DLSR camera with two lenses. There were times when the 400 mm lens was too much so I added a smaller zoom lens later.
What a difference these zoom lenses made! I could now get the close up shots of wildlife I wanted. This eagle was high up in a tree in Alaska.
Bald Eagle at Chilcoot Lake State Park, Haines, AK
In addition to the landscapes and wildlife I enjoy close up photography of flowers and critters from the garden.
Camelia
I’ve never been very good photographing people. Other than taking family pictures I think I’ll stick to nature and landscapes.
Wandering Dawgs 