Black and white and gobs of gray. I haven’t spent much time with black and white photography, but I thought I would take a shot at Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Black and White Photos. I took these shots with my phone with the help of a couple of special lenses. I decided to let the photos speak for themselves this time, so no quirky captions.
So you don’t think I’ve completely abandoned my blog, here are some odd ball photos for Cee’s Odd Ball Photo Challenge Week 11. Since I’m a fan of macro/close-up photos, I included a couple in this group. Enjoy the scenery! I’ll be back with some weird short stories soon.
No, it’s not a fish! It’s a tiny moth resting on my basil plant leaf. From afar, he looks sort of faded purple and is about a quarter of an inch long. With my iPhone macro lens, his true colors are revealed.
This is a refreshing and delicious lemon floating in a mug of beer. Taken with my iPhone macro lens.
Here’s an evil sand sculpture on the beach in Florida. He must have brought the oppressive heat and humidity with him.
Don’t stare too long into the eye! This is a knot on an aspen tree in Colorado. I felt like the trees were watching me. (Cee’s photo of the face in the tree inspired me to include this one.)
For The Daily Post’s weekly photo challenge, we are supposed to show perspective. The eye can be fooled.
Just having a little fun using my iPhone macro lens. Don’t mind me, I’ve gone a little magnify crazy. Enjoy the startlingly close-up scenery!
My blogging holiday hiatus is almost finished, and all I can say is, “Whew! Glad that’s over!” I feel like I’ve neglected my faithful followers for the last few weeks. For that, I apologize and hope you all understand. I’ll be back soon. So in the meantime, enjoy a few iPhone photos I took using a nifty little clip-on macro lens that my wonderful husband gave me for Christmas.
May the new year find you in fine fettle and be filled with good fortune. Cheers!
Fading Bougainvillea Bract
Even though it’s still warm here on the Florida Gulf Coast, we have a few falling leaves. I took some close-ups to bring out the texture and color. From a distance they look like unremarkable dead leaves, but they’re really kind of amazing when you stop to look. This is about as “fall-ish” as we get.
Yellowing Polka Dot Plant Leaf
I wanted to share a few jumpers, crawlers, and inchers that like to hang out in my yard. It’s a never-ending parade of critters. Everybody likes insects, frogs, and lizards, right?
The weekly photo challenge for The Daily Post is to show saturated. Here are my photos saturated with color. Please enjoy in moderation or with tinted lenses.
I took close-up photos of a U.S. five dollar bill to show the lines, textures and patterns that are generally missed by the naked eye.
These are images of a cholla cactus skeleton. After all the succulent flesh and spines dry up and fall off, this is what’s left. I love the texture and pattern.
I took close-ups of a Hawaiian Ti leaf, one newly emerged and the other aging. The colors and lines are amazing.
For this week’s Festival of Flowers, I chose the lovely state flower of Hawaii and the national flower of South Korea, Republic of Haiti and Malaysia.
With over 10,000 species, it is not only extraordinarily beautiful, it’s edible, practical and medicinal. Some hibiscus species are used in herbal teas, as a vegetable, as a natural alternative for food coloring and for paper-making. It’s also said to be a natural diuretic and may help lower blood pressure. [source]
I took the bud photos in the evening and the opened flower the next morning. I don’t know the exact species of my hibiscus, so I probably won’t eat or drink it. I’ll just enjoy watching it grow.
You can check out the other contributions and link up here: Festival of Flowers: Week 13. Be sure and thank Jackie for sponsoring this flowery weekly challenge.
A lovely billbergia bromeliad flower…
They bloom in the fall and often in the spring here in Florida. I think they get confused by our weather patterns. I have masses of them growing under and climbing the trunks of several large live oak in my yard.
If you would like to join the Festival of Flowers: Week 12, please visit and link up.
Window of nature
Radiant dewdrop of life
Slips away unsung
This weekend Trifextra challenge was to write a haiku. The photograph of the morning dew on my rosemary plant was my inspiration. I love the reflection of the plant in the water droplet.
Something must be wrong with me. I’ve contracted a sweet writing disease. Fear not. The disorienting poetry fever will pass, and I shall return to my roots of the melancholy and weird, soon.
In honor of randomness, and because I like using that word, I’m sharing some arbitrary photos for The Daily Post’s Weekly Photo Challenge. This week it’s about focus. Something I often lack in life and can’t achieve in a photo.
I picked these photos because I don’t know where else I would share some of this odd stuff, if not on my blog.
The beachy photos were taken in Florida. The catamarans are a shot from the island of Dry Tortugas National Park, 70 miles west of Key West. One of the least visited national parks in the U.S. You can learn more about the park here. It’s a spectacular place to visit. I used the tilt-shift effect on the photo.
The seaweed comes from Ft. Myers Beach, as well as the sand dollars. The sand dollars were dead when I found them. I decided not to remove their prickly spines or bleach them. They are all natural. In case you didn’t know, some sand dollars are brown and furry in life. The white ones you typically see are bleached and cleaned over time by the sun or humans. Both photos were shot in macro/microscopic mode.
The weed roots and the lizard skeleton were taken in macro/microscopic mode. I suppose I should explain the skeleton. He was found that way in the pool skimmer; snuffed out by drowning in chlorine water. Poor thing. A moment of silence would be nice. He’s commemorated in a grotesque photo for all of eternity now.
Using tilt-shift again, I created the effect on the Pike’s Peak Cog Railway atop the mountain, at over 14,000 feet, near Colorado Springs, Colorado. It’s a dizzying ride up.
I hope you enjoyed looking at my focus photo ensemble. Please let me know what you think. Feedback is always appreciated.
Fungi, mushrooms, toadstools, no matter what you call them, I seem to have developed a growing fascination with photographing them. I decided to learn a little more about them. I’ve discovered that they are quite peculiar.
Mushrooms are
not plants. They’re in a class of their own called fungi. They break-down and “eat” dead plant matter, storing nutrients in their body until they have enough to produce that lovely fruit that pops up from the loam. Everyone knows some of them are delicious when fried, some are tasty on pizza and some are best left alone. But I’m not a mushroom expert, so I only eat the ones that pop-up on the grocery shelves. Continue reading
Chronic Nonsense 