Wildlife, landscape and weather photography
Something a bit different. Obviously this flower wasn’t outside – it was a leftover from a bouquet I bought my wife. It provided a nice opportunity for me to experiment with a new toy, my first, true macro lens.
The Canon EF 100mm f2.8 L is pretty cool and well-known for its ability to do amazing closeup work. I won’t use it much but thought it would be fun to play with in the yard with flowers, bugs and snowflakes. The detail is clearly pretty awesome.
Now that’s a sunset, eh? Sunflowers below, storm clouds with virga above and those Rocky Mountains dominating the horizon in the distance.
I was flipping through some recent pics and came across this one taken at the end of August that I hadn’t shared yet.
I was at this spot east of Denver, Colorado primarily to photograph the sunflowers but soon I became focused on also capturing the gathering storm clouds. They didn’t produce much but they did definitely add drama to the scene.
A little bit of lightning fun on the plains of Colorado.
I was a bit late getting to this spot yesterday evening and missed much of the show. Thankfully, I did get there in time to get a few cool captures.
The thunderstorms were quite strong and very electrified sending many bolts to the ground. Throw in the orange glow of the setting sun and the flowers and it was pretty neat.
I don’t have a lightning trigger so just have to keep snapping pics repeatedly hoping lightning pops at the right time.
A break from pics of my visit to the 49th state to an image from the 38th taken this past weekend.
My photo outing Saturday wasn’t as productive as I would have liked but I did find a few worthy subjects. Most notable were the first signs of blooming sunflower fields.
Only a small portion of them have opened with prime time probably still a week or two away. The ones that were open did make a few, nice compositions like this one.
I might be biased but I tend to think that Colorado has just about the prettiest state flower of any and it is most fitting to share these on Colorado Day.
I happened across this scene a couple weeks ago and spent tons of time photographing it – I had never seen so many columbines in one location.
The floor of the forest under the aspen trees was covered with them! I suspect it had something to do with the wet winter we had.
What do you do when you are bored but don’t feel like driving around for a photo op? You head to the backyard! Actually, in this case, our side yard in front where my wife has an awesome flower garden going on.
Among the subjects, the Centennial State’s flower which I have to say is just beautiful. I don’t have a “real” macro lens so make do with standard glass but it is fun to get out there and see what I get.
There are 70 specials of columbine, a third of which are native to North America. For the Colorado state flower, it is specified as the Rocky Mountain columbine, like these, with the purple and white. It is said the purple / blue represent the sky, the white the snow and the yellow our state’s gold mining history.
Just kind of a pretty scene I came across a few weeks ago on the Great Plains. These wild sunflowers were in full bloom and putting one solo against those gorgeous skies worked well.
I’ve been seeing tons of these beautiful flowers across the Great Plains lately and last weekend made sure to capture some pics of them. This image is probably my favorite of the bunch. As the sun rose it illuminated the petals of the flowers making them seem to glow. Image available here.
The sunflowers are in bloom on the Colorado plains and I of course had to head out and check them out this past Sunday. There didn’t seem to be quite as many fields of them in the usual areas this year and a couple fields looked really anemic. This one though was gorgeous and ablaze in bright yellow beneath our blue skies. A closer look at this one saw a busy pollinator at work. The bee was well-camouflaged with its color scheme closely matching the flower’s.
Some captures from this afternoon after a period of intense rain here in the Denver area. I don’t have a true macro lens so made do with my wide angle and getting within a few inches of the flowers.
Somehow my camera was taking JPGs instead of RAW files so that really limited my ability to process the images and get the quality I was hoping for. Nevertheless, it was fun to take some pics of something different.
