For this month’s Sunday Stills Monthly Color Challenge Terri wants to know if we are all in for yellow. I am!
On a recent visit to middle Georgia my husband and I wandered around Butterflies and Blooms in the Briar Patch at the Briar Patch Walking Trail in Putnam County, Georgia. As I walked along the trail I kept my eyes peeled for butterflies and yellow flowers. I hope you enjoy these yellows as much as I did!
July and August in coastal Georgia are always hot, humid and stormy. It’s too hot to sit outside on my porch or go out to take photos. With heat indexes over 100 degrees Fahrenheit it’s easy to be lazy and stay inside to cool off in the air conditioning. Many afternoons have found me inside reading or watching the storms as they roll in. The rainbows after the storm have been spectacular.
The full moons have been spectacular, too.
It’s much too hot to go out and tend to my garden. This year I got lazy and put off pulling weeds in my flower beds because of the heat. I finally found that if I got started pulling weeds about 8:00 a.m. I could get a little work done before the heat got too much for me. Despite my lack of attention, some of the flowers are thriving.
Here in coastal Georgia we usually don’t start getting cooler weather until October. Until then, if you need me, I’ll be inside where it’s cool.
I can’t let April go by without mentioning that April is the Month of the Military Child. Military children are also sometimes called Brats. I am proud to be a United States Air Force Brat.
Trip to the Country
After what seems like a long, cold winter we took a short road trip to the country in early April. We couldn’t go by the Georgia Football Barn Sign on Georgia Highway 15 in Tennile with stopping to snap a few photos. The trees were just beginning to display their green leaves. We spotted a few deer and wild turkeys but I wasn’t able to capture a photo.
Flowers
I was happy to see that these plants survived the freeze we had around Christmas.
Backyard Birds
Painted Buntings and other birds started appearing at my backyard bird feeder and in the surrounding salt marsh. The hummingbirds are also here but so far I haven’t been able to get a photo of them.
Books
Our Book Club book for April was “The Blessing of the Celtic Curse”, the first in the Saints of Savannah series. The author, Leigh Ebberwein was our guest at our April meeting. We all loved the book and enjoyed hearing her stories about writing the book.
I also enjoyed reading “Remarkable Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt, “My Sisters Grave” by Robert Dugoni and “Still Life” by Louise Penney.
I find peace in nature – a beautiful morning sky, bird watching, spring flowers, walking in the woods, seeing wildlife in their natural habitat, or the beach.
Waking up at sunrise and seeing a brilliant sky brings me peace.Great Blue HeronSpring azaleasWhite azaleasA walk in the Georgia woodsWhite Tail Fawn, Middle GeorgiaThe beach at sunset at St. Joseph Peninsula State ParkSunrise over the Atlantic Ocean.
In this challenge Sofia asks us to work on exposure. We can use our camera’s shutter speed or play with the aperture settings when we are shooting. Another way to work with exposure is to change the exposure when editing.
This is a great challenge for me because I tend to be on the lazy side and let my camera do the work using the automatic feature. This method is great when I’m shooting wildlife that moves and I don’t have time to change settings quickly. Often, when taking photos of other subjects I’m not happy with the results if I let the camera do the work.
The two images below were taken just minutes apart. I used the camera’s automatic settings for the first image. I used the manual settings to change the shutter speed to 1/20 to achieve the overexposed look for the second image.
In the images below I played with different settings to capture the first camellia of the season. For the first image I set the aperture to a low 4.6. I set the shutter speed to 1/4000 for the second image.
Wandering Dawgs 