Terri’s Sunday Stills challenge is Nature’s Golden Yellows. The Lens-Artists challenge from Ann-Christine is What’s in a Garden? Both these challenge have flowers and nature in common so combining them into one post made perfect sense to me.
I’ve discovered many golden yellow flowers and butterflies during walks in nature and when visiting gardens. The following images are a few of my favorites.
Yellow at Calloway GardensGarden in AlaskaYellow Butterfly
For Sofia’s challenge I chose flowers that bloomed this May in my coastal Georgia garden.
I had a big oops in January that fractured my left arm. My garden is suffering this year because I couldn’t get out and work in it this spring. The only blooms I’ve had are from plants that come back year after year.
The header image is of one of my knock out rose bushes. I cropped the header image for a closer look at the flowers.
The next gallery has two images of the same hydrangia bloom. The image on the left shows the whole bloom and the one on the right zooms in on the details.
The final gallery includes a black eyed Susan, hibiscus, pink oleander, and a southern Magnolia.
John is our host for the challenge Before and After. His challenge is to “feature three or four images in your gallery that you tweaked for whatever reason as well as the original image straight out of the camera.” I almost always crop my images and sometimes do other minor editing. I experimented with a few different edits for this challenge. All of my editing is done using Adobe Photoshop Elements.
My header image is the final edited version of a favorite image from our 2013 RV trip to Alaska. We camped in a waterfront campground in Haines, Alaska for about a week. The following image is the original photo I took one rainy night from our campsite.
To achieve the after image in the header I first cropped the photo to focus on the three ships with the mountains in the background. I then adjusted the blue hue/saturation levels. I finished it off by adjusting the levels of black and white.
Original image before edits
The following image is the original closeup of lemon blossoms.
Original photo before edits
I started out by cropping the photo to a square so the blossoms would be the focus of the image. Next, I added a white vignette effect to soften the floral image. The final image after all edits is shown below.
Final image after edits
The next two images are of Dogwood blossoms. The first image is the original.
Original image before edits
I began by cropping to select the blossoms in the center of the photo. I wanted to create an artistic image so I added the Colored Pencil filter and tweaked the settings to get the look I wanted in the following finished edit.
“April Showers bring May Flowers” is the theme for Terri’s latest Sunday Stills photo challenge.
I was in elementary school when I first heard the saying about April showers bringing May flowers. Where I live in coastal Georgia, many of our flowers bloomed in March and have already faded. I walked around my yard to find these flowers the first week of April.
The header image is of my Dogwood tree blooming in the first week of April. I’ve been enjoying the Dogwood flowers since March.
March is peak season for azaleas where I live in coastal Georgia. This light pink bloom is one of the final azaleas in my yard this year.
These Meyer Lemon blossoms will hopefully bring me some lemons this winter.
Wandering Dawgs 