Every Day is a Gift!
I often see insects on garden flowers but it is a challenge to get them to stay still long enough for a photo. Here are a few insects I managed to capture through the years.
Shared with Terri’s Sunday Stills challenge Insects
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.
I’ll finish with a gallery of yellow flowers
Many thanks to Ann-Christine for her Lens-Artists Challenge #311 What’s In a Garden?
Many thanks to Terri for her Sunday Stills challenge Nature’s Golden Yellows
Ritva’s challenge is to pay attention to the background behind our subject.
I chose a few images from nature for this challenge. I used depth of field to blur the background to keep the focus on the main subject.
Many thanks to our host Ritva for this challenge Lens-Artists #304 – Behind
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.
Many thanks to our host Sofia for her challenge Lens-Artists #301 – Floral
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.
The following image is the original closeup of lemon blossoms.
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.
The next two images are of Dogwood blossoms. The first image is the original.
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.
Many thanks to our host John for the challenge Lens-Artists #294 – Before and After
Wandering Dawgs 