Welcome to my world along the Georgia coast where I am surrounded by salt water creeks and rivers, salt marsh and a beach on the Atlantic Ocean is only a five minute drive away. Please join me for a glimpse of some of the natural beauty that is in my world.
Birds and Wildlife of Coastal Georgia:
Great EgretAtlantic Bottlenose Dolphin near Tybee Island, GeorgiaWood Stork and EgretWood Stork with a face only a mother could loveGreat blue heron in the salt marsh beside the trailRoseate Spoonbill in Georgia Tidal CreekOsprey looks over the salt marshIbisHawk in coastal GeorgiaBald Eagle in coastal GeorgiaMale Painted BuntingSnowy Egret in the neighborhoodDiamondback TerrapinJuvenile Horned Owl
Salt Marsh, Beaches, and Waterways
Sunrises and Sunsets
Sun rise over the Atlantic OceanSunset over the Georgia Salt MarshCoastal Georgia Sunset
Flowers and critters in the garden
Mexican SunflowerSummer SunflowerMonarch ButterflyPair of Monarch Caterpillars on MilkweedGulf FritillaryZebra Longwing on Mexican SunflowerSpring AzaleasSpring Dogwood BloomZinniaCamellias blooming in February
Wild Georgia Shrimp and Georgia Blue Crabs fresh from the sea.
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.
When I saw Terri’s Monthly Color Photo Challenge was for the color Glacier Blue, I took the challenge literally and browsed through my archives searching for the blue in my glacier images from our 2013 Alaska RV trip.
I was amazed each time we saw one of these ancient, gigantic bodies of ice. We saw a few from the road, many from nature cruises, and even some from an airplane. Each one took my breath away. We could feel the cold each time we approached one for a closer look. Seeing all these images again brought back many happy memories.
The captain of our cruise from Seward took us close to the Aialik Glacier and shut off the engines so we could see and hear the glacier calving. There’s more about that amazing experience at Glaciers and Wildlife in Seward
Aialik Glacier, AlaskaCalving on Aialik Glacier, Alaska
Probably the most memorable day of our Alaska journey was the day we took a flight seeing trip from Talkeetna. We not only saw glaciers from the air, but our plane landed on one.
Flying over a glacier in AlaskaThe blue glacier water can be seen from the airBeth on Ruth glacier under a clear blue sky
On a nature cruise from Valdez our boat navigated through the ice and in Juneau we saw Mendenhall Glacier up close.
Glacier Blue Ice in AlaskasMendenhall Glacier, Alaska
While these images make me cold as I look at them they also make me happy. I feel so grateful we were able to make the trip when we did.
Wandering Dawgs 