Lunchtime Flower Photos

Today's photo prompt was photograph natural beauty. My intent was to find a small vase and take a picture of the lavender, but the lavender is almost past bloom and I couldn't find a small vase. I used the mason jar that I got at last year's wedding. 

I have already used the vase for a picture earlier in June, when the flowers in my gardens were yellow and white, now it's time for the coneflowers and bee balm. Today I worked from home and during lunch I quickly cut a few flowers and found a naturally lighted spot on the table. The close up above was used for the flickr 365 group and I used the flowers below for today's cy365 prompt. I liked the dark black ground and wanted to add texture to make it artistic.

Two textures.

Without texture

7/21 A Couple of July Photos

7/19 Posing Loon - Felt a bit sea sick after focusing while kayaking. 

Centered Face

Where have I been? Working, working, working.....I manage to get the daily picture taken but there's not a lot of creativity. I continue taking pictures to practice. All of my photos are in my flickr albums. If you know me, then you know how to get to the photos. I will try to at least post once a week for a few of my favorites of the week.

Odd Number of flowers

 When I upgraded Lightroom, I upgraded to the Adobe creative studio which includes photoshop. This means I have more tools to learn that will help improve my photos. See the nails in the face picture to the right? So easy to remove in photoshop and that's just a tiny bit of what can be done in photoshop. Another learning experience, but it has already come in handy on my work computer since I have a couple of pages that I need to maintain on that site.

And the Obligatory Hummingbird picture for July

The challenge to getting my pictures done each day is the light. Taking pictures in the early evening doesn't provide a lot of light to be able to use fast speeds for hummingbird pictures. But considering the lack of light, at least I now know how to make changes to the settings to at least get the humming bird in focus.

CY365 Pictures of the Day

Fun with Textures- Day lilies gone wild

1/23 On The Third

Flying Back to Winter

1/23 Photograph On The Third

Landscape / Sky / Horizon

The prompt instructions for today was to make sure that the horizon was not in the middle, but either in the top or bottom third. After a few sunrise pictures, I went the travel route and used a picture taken from the airplane. I should have used the landscape format for the picture to include more detail of the ground. But now that I am looking at all the pictures from the morning, I should have gone with a sunrise shot.

For the flickr shot, I went with a tropical flower for color. It will be the last bright outside color for me for a few weeks. I took a photo with my iPhone and edited it in stackablesapp. 

23/365 Tropical Color 

1/14 Bright Flower

Bright Yellow Flower

1/14 Photograph Be Positive

Bright Side / Confident / Happy

A gray day which didn't stop us from golfing again. I used one picture for both projects today and thought the pop of yellow was a good picture for a cold day for most people. 

Even wind doesn't keep us away from the golf course.

Illuminated Day Lilies

Illuminated Day Lilies

7/13 Photograph Beautiful Light

From Above / Spot light / Illuminate

Today's picture was all about light from above. Luckily, we had bright sun earlier this morning before the clouds of this afternoon. Before heading out to our golf tournament, I quickly went out in the gardens to find light. So many choices again! I picked the picture of the day after an afternoon of golf and a cookout over at our friends' home. It was a nice, busy day and we got the golf done before the rain. The tournament was a scotch format where we both teed off and then hit each other's shot and after the second shot we then took turns hitting it. My husband I did well on the first nine, but had one horrible hole in the back that we weren't able to recover from. It was a fun format, win or lose, with a few good holes thrown in. 

More flower shots from this morning.

If only this lady bug was in focus along with being on a perfect daisy, this would be a fantastic shot. Unfortunately for me, the lady bug was very active and I wasn't quick enough with the macro lens as it was constantly moving. 

This was my second shot that I almost went with for today, but once again, the petals weren't good enough for me. This is from the tall day lily plant that is now over 5 feet tall, I was taking the picture from below the flowers with the sky as the back ground. 

Summertime Catch Up

I fell behind this week with a party, a real estate photo job and work. And since I am whining, the heat was not conducive to being on my lap top until tonight when we finally put the air conditioner in downstairs. Plus, due to yesterday's thunderstorm that caused a microburst 1/2 mile from here, we were without electricity until the middle of the night. I continued to take a picture a day and managed to get those posted to Captureyour365 except for yesterday's due to the weather.

What did you miss this week? A lot of stretching of the prompts, enjoy!

In the Shade

6/27 Photograph In the Shade

Cool Down / Under the Umbrella / Relax

My son and his friend happily went into the shade for this picture, kind of hard to take a picture of such tall guys without cutting something off. I guess there are worse things than feet to lose in a picture. At least it's better than the picture someone took of them at the wedding in a couple pose. Can you believe I actually had a cashier ask me if they were brothers? 

Graduation Portrait

6/28 Photograph Traditional Wear

Native Dress / Classic / Historic

No traditional gown here, but a happy high school graduate, my friend's L's daughter. It was a fun party with games and Karaoke. L and I got up to do Paradise by the Dashboard light. Lucky to have a beautiful evening for the party as we were outside the whole time.

Picking Up My Golf Ball

6/29 Photograph Clean Up

Pick up / Collect / Compile

This was an iPhone picture as that was part of the prompt, along with using apps for processing. 

We went golfing in the Lakes Region after I took pictures of a former lab employee's house for a real estate listing. It was harder than I thought as I had to do some editing afterwards to level the pictures. I read up on how to take the photos and my tripod came in handy. 

Downtown Advertisements

6/30 Photograph Graffiti Walls

Art / Markings / Urban

Better than graffiti in my mind and this is a prominent wall downtown. I wonder if they will let it stay when they do their next revitalization project of downtown. 

Iced Coffee

7/1 Photograph Refreshing

A Frozen Treat / Quenching / Revitalizing 

This photo was taken with a tripod and a napkin was used for the "placemat". I should have straightened it a bit more. The camera was set up with the drive mode to take 6 pictures. The problem then was , do I pick a glass 1/2 empty or 1/2 full?

I picked the photo above because it has ice and the coffee is just flowing over the ice. 

It was a beautiful day and I did manage to get some pictures of the flowers in the front yard. 

These were taken with a macro lens.

Essential Summer Flower

7/2 Photograph The Essentials

Necessary / Fundamental / A Must

This was one of my non- promo shots for the week. I was busy getting out of the house early for work and then when I got back in the afternoon, it was in the middle of the storm. Then the lights went out.

This is the first good Clematis bloom out front. The gardens there seem to be a few weeks behind and this is the second year for this plant. It will be gorgeous next week. 

Patriotic Bird House?

7/3 Photograph All- American

Red, White, & Blue / Baseball / Apple Pie

This is the only patriotic thing here at my house except for a large American flag that we don't have a pole for.  And yes, I have taken a  picture or two of this before, but now there is color in the back yard. The bee balm will be blooming this weekend and will be a pretty contrast to the yellows, purples and white already in the garden. The Cone flowers are getting ready to bloom also with this one being the first:

I did have my camera with me today and was hoping that our town's bandstand would have some patriotic bunting which it did not, therefore, another picture from the garden. And there you have it, a week of pictures. 

Travel and Bubbles

Minivan for travel

6/4 Photograph Up North

Destination / Outing / Travel

Buoyant Bubbles

6/5 Photograph Floating By

Buoyant / Suspended / Drifting

Yesterday was a day that I almost missed in taking a picture. I was gone for most of the day golfing in a tournament and then golfing in my league. It was fun, I got to meet some really nice golfers who are at my level and even though we had some bad shots, overall it was a great day of golf. They invited me to their club's tournament in July and we are planning on trying to team up for the rest of the summer. It was my first time golfing in the state's women's golf association and I was nervous about all the rules and playing with strangers, but it worked out great. The prompt was for traveling and my minivan all set for the summer was good enough at 9 PM when I got home. It actually works.

Today's prompt was a little harder today as the email this morning was about clouds floating. As I drove up to work today, all I saw was overcast gray clouds hanging in the sky, no floating going on there. I even stopped by the town pond where I could actually see the sky and even though there was more clouds to be seen and even a surprise heron, I wasn't thrilled with the pictures.  The clouds still seemed to be hanging, nothing buoyant in those pictures. 

Heron landing

At least I had thought ahead and picked up bubbles to have a fall back plan. When I got home, I enlisted the help of my son. "Can you help me with today's picture and blow some bubbles?" His reply, "Seriously?" followed by a large sigh. Me: "You loved this when you were three." After about 5 minutes and many out of focused bubbles, I got a couple of good bubble shots and then decided on my son blowing bubbles as the perfect buoyant picture. It has a good composition with him along one of the imaginary third lines with negative space in front of him for the bubbles. 

One Iris is finally blooming in the front garden. Just one, with the rest getting ready. Still loving my macro lens, can you tell?

Quiet Spot

My Spot in the Morning Sun for Coffee

5/15 Photograph Relaxing

Quiet / Rest / Stress Free

This picture would have been a better shot if the sun had been out this morning. After coming back from food shopping, I tried to take the photo again with sun through so many different angles. However, I took too many photographs of the same subject to try to figure out which one to use. Luckily, I have a Fine Arts graduate in the house who helped me critique the photos to determine which was the best. Why this one? Because you see the whole chair in profile with the cup of coffee in focus, the lines of the walkway show movement, there is vibrant color and no distraction of the street in the background. Once I went through the group of pictures, I knew what I liked, but needed the help to weed out to get to the best. With my son's help, I think we did it!

The purple tulips are popping up all over the garden right now and it's good to have pictures of their location. Next year, I would like to have even more to have more photograph options. Maybe some more whites and purples. Who knew that there is blue in the inside of the tulips?

Took the bottom right photo to make a another texture photo. I love how soft the texture makes the background look and the textured flowers could end up as a card set. 

This scene below was what we have going on right now on the street. Lots of boys and their toys with bikes and wagons, thought this was cute.

Graceful

Poised Cherry Blossoms

5/7 A Vision of Poise

Graceful / Elegant / Balanced

This was not an easy prompt for me today as my original idea was just awful. The suggestion was to take a picture from behind. Nobody here to take a picture of behind doing something graceful. My son taking wood from the porch to the wood pile was as far from graceful as one could be. I will have to keep that idea for a photo composition in mind if I see somebody elegant or graceful from behind. In the meantime, if I am going with the idea of these 365 pictures as a type of daily journal along with a photo exercise, then I would rather have the the beautiful picture above than my original idea!

I was going to use a picture of a fern with the fiddleheads, but those came out ugly with spiky, black stuff on the stem. Then I thought I could use the young fern, but I did not like how the focusing turned out.  Luckily this morning, I was in Concord meeting with my friend L's interior designer who asked for Cherry Blossom pictures. The tree in front of the office building was beautiful today and he wanted big bunches of the flowers contrasted against the deep blue sky.  Got two good pictures without interfering branches which he liked.

Finally we had a warm day and it was great to be outside taking pictures. I wish that I could have done that all day. Unfortunately, too much to do around the yard. We have a minor ant problem in the basement, happens every spring and I had to clean around the outside foundation to put down the ant granules. And just like when you give a moose a muffin, that led to other things that needed to get done outside. Raking our little mini yard by the basement, pulling out bushes and planting some lilacs in our back yard. We have lilac bushes sprouting like weeds in the front corner of our yard and even though I found a home for what I pulled out last year, I decided to use them here in our yard. There is still the very front of the yard that needs to get weed, but I am nervous of venturing in and finding poison ivy, never a good thing for me.

This back garden needs to be raked and weeded, hopefully the weather will still warm to get it done tomorrow after I work on some pictures for my friend. 

May Flowers

Tulips

5/2 A Vision of May Flowers

With Bokeh / A Different Angle / From Behind

Today's prompt called for May flowers and after two photos of daffodils, it was time to add another spring flower to the mix. Unfortunately, daffodils are the only flowers in bloom in my home gardens and I needed to venture downtown for more city scene photos for my friend's office where I found tulips. On the drive home, I realized that I should have gone behind the fence to a point of view of the wrought iron fence framing the flowers. I hate when I think about that after the shot and I need to take more time with composition and move around the subject. However, in the above photo, I did get a little bit of the bokeh and I like how the main subject rises above the other tulips. 

The morning started out sunny with a beautiful blue sky which was perfect for taking more pictures of downtown Concord for my friend's office. The group of photos are providing me with the opportunity to use Lightroom 5 to process the photos as a group to the requested black and white format. Lightroom is incredible in all that it can do and I am feeling overwhelmed with everything it can do! I can't even begin to think about importing my current iPhoto collection of over 20,000 photos. Yes, I have a photo hoarding problem, with my first goal of cleaning out the photos by event. Can't and shouldn't keep them all! Time to be critical with what to save. 

In the afternoon, we were off to Stowe, Vermont for my cousin's wedding. We scored the best accommodations as we had asked for a suite of rooms with a kitchen for my husband and I, along with my parents, aunt and sister-in-law. We stayed in a condo with 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, full kitchen, living room and den. The best part was that we could eat in and we saved by not being in a hotel room for two nights. After dinner, we joined up with the wedding party after the rehearsal dinner where it was an early night for us!