I've taken a record number of flower photos this spring, so I thought I'd share a few with you. I actually took these in March and April, so it's winter showers that produced them, not April showers. Still, it's been a record year for wildflowers in Texas, and I think everyone in the area has enjoyed the season.
If you hate wildflowers, especially bluebonnets, you should look away now.
Oh, and there are some trees, cacti, barbed wire, cows, and other Texas type stuff too. I like to mix it up. If you want to see a bigger version, click on it, or right click to open in a new tab or new window.
This first one was titled "The Tree of Good and Evil" by my friend Karen. Now I can't think of it any other way. I love pictures of trees and find dead trees fascinating. I think this one may be my all time favorite tree.
I took this photo both ways: with the trees in focus and with the post in focus. More people like the post in focus. I don't know what it is about pictures of posts and barbed wire, but people love them.
Speaking of Texas style pictures, it doesn't get much more Texan than this: a windmill, barbed wire, and bluebonnets all in one picture. We had this printed in an 8x10. It was one of my favorites from this spring. I think it was this picture that caused my husband to mutter about how he's been taking pictures for over 30 years but my eye is better than his. And yet I want Lisa Hackbarth's eye. Go figure.
Field of showy primrose. How I love those cheery pink flowers. It's hard to believe these only last a day, innit?
These people have a lovely plot of land right on Highway 290 with a lot of bluebonnets that are probably hard to see at this resolution. I'm sure they work hard on their land, but it looks so very peaceful right here. I haven't yet made it a desktop, but I might because it's so very relaxing to me.
Again with the Texas things in pictures. I really wanted a shot of a cow with bluebonnets, and this cow obliged me by checking me out closely as I took a few shots of the field of flowers near where he (she?) is grazing. I got three shots of the alert cow look you see here before it went back to munching.
Another amazing piece of land right on 290. The huge field leading up to the house is actually very manicured, but this wilder field is on a hill farther back. I'm crouched down so that it looks like it's all flat to the house, but there's a huge dip and then a long hill up to the house. There is a white plank fence and a barbed wire fence with "no trespassing" signs to keep the camera people off their property -- and rightly so. Beautiful house though.
This is the far end of someone's front yard. I just loved the flowers and the intersection of all the fences. This was my desktop for a while.
This is the part of the day when I started to run out of light. The sky was really dramatic, but I could either get great shots of the sky or of the flowers -- not both. This was the best shot of both that I got.
I think there's a trick in which you can combine two or three shots taken at different light levels to get one fantastic shot. If anyone knows how to do that, please let me know. I have some amazing shots from that day that I'd like to fiddle with.
Again, I had a really tough time with lighting on this one. I have another shot of this in which you can see the bluebonnets clearly but the sky is blown out and another in which the sky is really dramatic but the bluebonnets are impossible to see. This is the (more or less) happy medium. Love the farmhouse, windmill and big tree on the left though.
I decided I wanted a shot of a single tree in silhouette at sundown. Since I parked my car by it, I got a bonus shot of my car, which I also like in silhouette for a completely different reason.
This is from the last batch of photos I took this season. I hadn't gotten any good cactus pics, and this is my prize. It's my current desktop, and I'm really enjoying it, especially with the orange-red and yellow flowers (whose name is currently escaping me).
