Golf

One of my favorite places in the world.  Our golf course in BR opened today and even though it was cloudy with lots of glare, it was a nice warm day.  #13....one of the prettiest holes on the course.  This is the shot from my tee.  On a clear day, there is a great view of Grandfather Mountain, but today the clouds prevailed.  We played with a good friend and our games weren't too bad, so a good time was had by all.

Snowdrop anemones

We're in Blowing Rock and haven't been here in almost a month.  Last time we were here it was totally winter....now our yard is blanketed with spring flowers, like these snowdrop anemones.

Morning light

This was possibly the earliest I've ever shot a photo for my blog.  This morning when I came down for my coffee I noticed the nice morning light coming into our hall, so I grabbed the wide angle lens and took a few shots.

Rose mix

I had an idea for an image I thought I'd try today.  I wanted to blend together several photos to make a composite, abstract image.  I took 9 shots of a trailing Lady Banks rose and a Japanese maple, deliberately over and under exposing some of them.  Then I blended the images together using layers in Photoshop.  I experimented with various opacity levels and layer styles to get the final product.  I think I ended up using 7 of the photos.  The subject matter wasn't my goal today...it was more about playing around with the process.  I liked what I could do with this (not necessarily the end result) and I think I'll use this approach again with some better subjects.

First rose of summer

Not much time for photography today, but during a break in the thunderstorms I rushed out to get an image of our first rose of the season with some raindrops in the sun.

Time for a photo

George gave me a nice flash for my birthday last year, but I really haven't learned how to use it very well, so I thought I'd play around with it for a few minutes today to see what I could learn.  I put this clock in various lighting settings and then tried out the flash at different levels of intensity and different bounce angles.  There was probably too much ambient light to notice much difference, so the photos looked fairly similar.  At least I learned a little bit about the different settings on the flash attachment.  Unfortunately, the manual for the flash isn't very detailed, so I think I'm going to need to get some more in-depth information to learn what I'm doing.  For some reason, flash photography intimidates me a little bit, so it's something I really need to learn.

Hosta leaf

After a week of non-stop photography and desert, I needed something quick and green tonight.  When I awoke in Charlotte this morning, the lush green of spring was a joy for my senses.  I loved the stark beauty of the desert, but I really missed the lovely green of our city.  During the week we were gone, this hosta in our yard grew to an impressive size.  These leaves are about 8 inches across and they looked positively decadent after the sparse vegetation of southern Utah.