Tag Archives: flowers

Weekly Photo Challenge: The Golden Hour

Weekly Photo Challenge: The Golden Hourclematis and spider web

This photo as well as the top two images in my sidebar were taken in the “golden hour” before sunset tonight.

The clematis in front of our house is blooming beautifully right now, just a mass of deep pink blooms that reach at least five feet up the post they are growing on!

I’m busy scheming how I can manage to transplant such a large plant planted in such a rocky (base of a support post for the porch) location. I’m planning to wait until it’s done blooming and give it my best shot when we move.  My pictures don’t come close to doing it justice and it’s much too nice to give over to the bulldozers!

Any clematis transplanting tips? Helen?

Weekly Photo Challenge: Nostalgic

Weekly Photo Challenge: Nostalgic

hollyhocks and barnThere is something about yellow hollyhocks that always speaks of nostalgia to me.

Perhaps it’s the flower, perhaps it’s the color, perhaps it’s the memory of feeding the seeds from my grandpas flowers to his chickens.

Whatever it is, the sight of my own hollyhocks blooming in front of the barn had me jumping off the lawnmower for a quick photo break.

Not that I needed much convincing.

Hollyhocks give me warm fuzzy feelings.

Lawns care just make me grumpy.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Happy

Weekly Photo Challenge: Happy

These are a few of the things that made me happy this Wednesday.

Clara got an ant farm for her birthday. John thinks I’m obsessed with it. I think looking at the ants makes me happy!
My husband. Not only does he make me happy but I intended that he be featured in the MINE photo challenge. Sadly I didn’t manage to get a picture of him last week.
Decorating cakes
Oh, Diet Coke, how you make me happy. When combined with chocolate and a good book – bliss. On second thought ignore that book, that book is not making me happy!
Kids and Dogs playing outside together
Flowers from John
Beautiful fall days!

Notable absences are:

Trip – Who is with my brother in Montana happily hunting without me.

Ivy  – Sadly I missed the photo of her and Clara collecting eggs together. Kids playing together while doing chores makes me happy, happy, happy!

And the Ducks  -I challenge you to watch a line of duck walk around and not be just a little bit happier. I also challenge you to get within photographing distance of my ducks without panicking them out of there cute little ducky line.

Hope you also had a happy day!

Update:

In terrible mothering moments of the week I forgot to include Jane in my post. Of course she is a part of my daily happiness – she smiles lots, she giggles, she’s easy going, content and oh so easily overlooked in the chaos of the rest of the house.

On a positive note I haven’t forgotten her anywhere – yet – but I do take roll call when we get in the truck!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Close

Weekly Photo Challenge: Close

The clematis plant close to the camera is growing up my front porch.

In the background you can see the road and get any idea how close it is to our house.

In fact the house is close enough to the highway that a split second after the photo was taken the wind from that big blue semi blew the flowers around.

But, we have planted many trees and a willow fence across part of the yard and the road is close to tolerable.

Unfortunately they are very close to redoing the entire road that we live on.

We are waiting, and waiting, and waiting to see how this will affect our property and if the road will come any closer than it is.

And all this waiting is pushing me much closer to crazy than I’d like!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unfocused

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unfocused

Ugh!

This weeks photo challenge was not my favorite. Ideas I had either turned out smudgy and stupid, or had me cursing my camera. Since other than it’s flash my camera and I normally get along swimmingly it was frustrating experience.

Things I have learned this week:

-While having an auto focus is usual handy/excellent/nice/wonderful/easy sometimes a manual option would be really nice!

-My camera won’t do they very cool zoom while capturing technique I read about here.

-In effort to replicate Anne’s very cool effect in her cheetah pictures I discovered that I can’t get far enough away from the neighbors cows.

-I’m never getting rid of my creeping charlie.

-Tripods are essential for taking super zoomed in pictures even when they are of moving things like butterflies.

Today making a last ditch effort for something reasonable I was trying to zoom way in on something hoping to get a similar watercolor effect as the cheetahs had. I was hoping for a “watercolor” pastoral scene, chickens, ducks, cows, sheep… no such luck. Then I realized that the creeping charlie was in full bloom and the yard was swarming with bees and butterflies. Ivy and saw seven different kinds of butterflies and four different kinds of bees, all looking for those tiny purple flowers in the lawn! Unfortunately, even though they aren’t super crisp pictures, the butterflies weren’t what I would call “unfocused.”  So I aimed my camera at the only other spot of color in the yard, which happened to be a bunch of chives, zoomed as far in as I could and finally came up with something that I think fits the unfocused bill. Completely unedited it has a bit of that painting sort of feel, just by going to the extreme of the digital zoom.  I never would have thought to try anything like that before seeing the cheetah pictures, thank you Anne for the idea!

Here is one of my fairly focused butterfly photos… …now let’s get on to the next challenge!!!

If You Give A Kid A Tape Measure…

If you give a kid a tape measure she’ll want to measure the chickens.

When the chickens won’t hold still she’ll decide to measure her boot instead.

When she is measuring her boot by the flowers you might ask her to pose in front of them.

Being asked to hold still will remind her that there are flowers to be picked.

After she picks a flower she’ll need to swing it around crazily hitting herself in the face.

When she is done mangling the flower she’ll want to give it to you.

It’s possible that then her older sister will come home and when she finds the tape measure again it’ll be all fighting and tears between the two of them until you take it away.

The End