Dandelion season is pretty much over now, but I still haven’t posted these photos. I am WAY behind with all the things I want to post. XD But too many ideas is better than no ideas, right? Right.
Anyway, I took these pictures when we went on a nature walk with our friends. It was such a beautiful spring day. Look at all the sunshine!
The bee was feasting on these vetch blossom. Looks yummy! XD
And now we get to the dandelion part. LOOK at all those dandelions! One corner of the field was absolutely covered in them! I’ve never seen so many dandelions in one place. O.o
Megan kindly obliged and blew some dandelions for a mini photoshoot.
I love this one! ↓
Heh heh, it looks like she’s going to eat it.
XD XD XD
Ahh, I think dandelions are so pretty, don’t you?
The kids decided to have a dandelion contest: whoever found the dandelion with the longest stalk won. It was super fun to pick out the tall ones – some of the dandelions growing in the fields were two feet tall!
The little girls are so cute together. ♥
This is the lane that leads to my grandparent’s house. (They live just up the road from us.) Isn’t it so pretty with that huge old oak in the front?
Ahhh I love this maple in our front yard. It’s enormous and beautiful:)
Well, that’s about it for today! Which picture was your favorite? Does a dandelion contest sound fun?
I hope you enjoyed the post and thanks for reading, my dears. ♥
Yesterday we went on a beautiful hike in the mountains with our friends. It was tiring, but so fun! Plus there was a stream and a waterfall, so that automatically makes it a good trail. 🙂 I took quite a few absolutely TONS of pictures, so do some finger exercises, get comfortable, and start scrolling. 😛
Such a beautiful view, don’t you agree?
Ahh, so sunny. ♥
Beautiful ferns…
We’ve seen these weird corncob-like fungi before, but I don’t know what they’re called. We probably looked it up but then I forgot. XD
There were a bunch of mini cascades and waterfalls like this before we got to the big one.
A few people pictures: 😀
The kids were splashing rocks into a little pool and I got some really neat pictures with fast shutter speed. 🙂
I love how clear the water was!
Ahhh isn’t this waterfall GORGEOUS?!
I love the next picture, even though it sort of looks like Megan’s holding up the fallen log with her head. XD
Ha ha, my brother Jeff was climbing all over the place.
The fallen log kind of got in the way of the pictures, although it looked neat, too.
If you wade to the other end of the waterfall you find another, much steeper and narrower one. It’s basically just a shoot of white water.
BOKEH!
Aww, look at the cute little millipede. XD
Trying out my new lens on some flowers here…
Ohhh it was a gorgeous day, and the sun shining through the new leaves was just too pretty!
My little sister and her friend are so cute together. ♥
As we were driving back, I got a few good shots out the window. (Surprisingly, it worked a lot better when I rolled the window down. 😛 XD )
AHHH I absolutely LOVE this next photo! I love all the layers and shades. ♥
*Gasp* Okay Allison, maybe you went a bit too far this time. O.o I applaud you if you persevered to the end and actually looked at most of the pictures. XD I hope it wasn’t too strenuous of a journey. But wasn’t the waterfall gorgeous? And the mountains? Ahhh, it makes my heart happy. ♥
A little while ago Megan and I decided to do another sister’s photoshoot! (See the first one here. Oh yeah, she’s gotten contacts since then!) I don’t take pictures of people very often, so I thought it would give me good practice, and not to mention Sisters Photoshoots are really fun. 😀 They are certainly not the best portraits ever, but I had fun experimenting and I thought I’d show you guys the results. 🙂
Megan wanted me to get some pictures of her in a tree with the golden sun shining through the leaves, so I did… but they didn’t turn out quite as golden as it seemed like it should. XD
This is a random photo I took of Megan for a co-op thing. :
I really like this picture! I took it when we were on a nature walk when I also got a lot more pictures, so I’ll hopefully post those soon. Dandelions are so fun!
Ha ha, I *think* I caught Megan when she wasn’t looking. 😉
She was certainly looking here! No, I just scared her and she jumped. XD I love taking jumping pictures! Apparently Megan does too. XD
After that, Megan took some pictures of me. I was inspired by Loren’s gorgeous post to make a crimson clover flower crown. 😀 Heh heh, it was a bit too sunny so I’m squinting a bit and my smile looks kind of pained, but otherwise I like these pictures. XD XD XD I’ll keep trying… 😛
After that I took some pictures of myself with the timer on my camera, since I don’t have a remote. I kept running back and forth until I wore a path in the triticale field (and got my capris rather green). XD
I did get one that I liked enough to be my profile picture, as you might have noticed.
There we are! I hope you enjoyed these photos. 🙂 Do you like taking pictures of people?
***Allison***
P. S. Well, I am officially 17. I feel old. XD And I had a wonderful birthday, thanks so much for asking! 😀 Would you guys like to see a “haul” post? (Ugh, I really don’t like that name for some reason, so I shall change the title if I do it. 😛 ) This feels like an awkward ending now so… um, thanks for reading. XD
Hmm, I’ve made better titles. *Wince* You know you’re a photographer when you’re that excited over a new camera lens. XD BUT SERIOUSLY! I AM EXCITED!
I just ordered a new lens for my camera, and I am loving it! It’s a Nikkor 50 mm f/1.8 lens (see it here on Amazon), in case you were wondering. 🙂 *Update: Whoops, I accidentally said “zoom lens” at first, but I don’t think it’s actually a zoom lens. O.o* I love all the beautiful blur and bokeh it makes in the background with the subject in sharp focus. The one thing I don’t like is that I can’t get super close-up pictures unless I crop them smaller. But anyway, I’ll keep experimenting, and in the meantime, how would you like to see about a million or so pictures? Okay, maybe closer to a thousand, but still. 😉 😛
First I want to show you the difference between my old lens and my new lens. The next (awful) picture was taken with my old lens at ISO 800.
TERRIBLE! But the next picture was taken with my new lens at ISO 800. It’s so much brighter because it goes down to an aperture of 1.8 instead of 4 something, which means it lets in a ton more light and thus makes the entire picture brighter. Ta-daa! (Okay, I know it still isn’t a beautiful picture, but my youngest brother kindly brought the iris in for me to take pictures of with my new lens and I decided to experiment. 🙂 ) So in conclusion, this new lens is way better for indoor photography and other low-light situations.
Now for the actually pretty pictures. 🙂 Get ready for lots of raindrops, snails, and flowers!
I had to up the ISO quite a bit here so it’s kind of grainy, but I still like it. 🙂
Ohhhh this next one is one of my favorites!
As you can see, it was getting pretty dark when I took this picture. I think it looks kind of neat that way though!
I got quite a few pictures of this cute little snail meandering over a bush. 🙂
AWWWWW he’s so cute! 😀
↓This poor guy’s shell looks a bit shattered.
The next two photos are a little different. For the first one I shined (or is it shone?) a flashlight close to the drops, and for the second one I used flash. *GASP*, she used flash?! I know it does look a bit flash-y, but I thought it was worth it to capture the neat glittery effect.
Moss pink are such adorable, bright flowers!
Yep, it’s a fly. 🙂
Lily of the Valley flowers are such charming little things, but goodness gracious, their perfume is so strong it nearly knocks you over! (Ha ha, I guess it can be that way with humans too. XD )
I really like the next picture for some reason. It’s so crisp in the foreground and beautifully blurred in the background.
Ahh, so pretty!
I love this next picture! The blur makes it look so much more professional! 😀
Taking pictures of clouds and landscapes isn’t really what this lens is made for (you can’t zoom out far enough), but I did get a decent picture of part of a cloud.
PHEW! Are you still here? If you are, congratulations on making it through all those pictures. XD I hope you liked them!
Do you think snails are cute? Do you love raindrops on things as much as I do?
After church we had a belated but absolutely delicious Easter lunch at my grandparent’s house with our cousins.
Afterwards the kids went down to play with Marigold, a sweet, tame cat who lives in the barn.
We got distracted from the cat by a game of “Who Can Find the Tallest Dandelion.” If you have never played that game, I highly recommend it. 🙂 Sometimes the simplest, happy things are the best things.
We have hundreds and thousands of dandelions around our farm, and some of them grow over two feet tall in the fields. Seriously.
I won the contest that day, but today my brother found what could be the record breaker: a whopping 27 inch tall dandelion.
We graciously fed our dear rabbits some of the losing dandelions. Lily sat there contentedly, not moving except for her mouth and nose, slurping up dandelion stems like spaghetti. We tried not to let the dandelions run out, but eventually they did. Until they stopped she just nibbled away one after another, looking mildly disinterested and rather sleepy.
Then we gathered eggs – a not very lovely part of the afternoon, because they were extremely dirty and it took forever. The good thing is, it didn’t actually take forever, because we finished eventually.
When we were doing the dandelion contest earlier, I had noticed the beautiful crimson clover and vetch blooms in the fields. After eggs, I ran down to the house and grabbed my camera straight away.
And so here are the photos. I love the peaceful, beautiful, serene atmosphere of them. ♥
And I love that little things like dew drops and triticale and even weeds like dandelions can be so pretty and graceful.
*Happy sigh* I really enjoyed this photoshoot and I hope you did too! Thank you for persevering through allllll of those pictures. 🙂 Do you have a favorite or favorites?
Are you ready for a ton of spring-y pictures? Good gracious, the trees all look very different now, even though I didn’t take these pictures that long ago. Our one maple tree has pretty much full-blown leaves now. Spring moves rather quickly, doesn’t it?
The curly willow tree beside our rabbit hutch is pretty in spring… actually it’s usually pretty. 😀
This old tree isn’t exactly the springiest, but it’s still neat. 🙂 I love the bumps and fine texture of the wood.
This is the view from one of my bedroom windows. 🙂 The triticale field is so much taller now.
Oh my goodness, how beauteous are these apple blossoms? ♥ AND LOOK AT THAT BOKEH! XD
You don’t usually think of maple trees as flowering trees, but I guess they kind of are – only the flowers are green instead of pink or yellow or something.
There! I’m catching up with my photos, except I just took about 100 pictures yesterday… Oops. XD I’ll probably post those next! (Don’t worry, not all 100 of them. XD )
Are your trees getting leafy too? Or have the leaves never left to begin with?
I’m really excited to show you guys this edition of “Beautiful Things”!” 🙂 Today I have a bunch of pictures of little beauties, like spring flowers and grass. Little things are probably my favorite photography subjects.
Yes, I know henbit is a weed, but I still think it’s pretty when it’s all crowded together in a sea of purple!Side note: we were studying weeds today for Nature Study, and we found and identified eighteen different kinds on our short walk! O.o
OOH I LOVE THIS ONE! I like how dark and dramatic it is. The manual settings on my camera were a bit off, but it turned out neat that way.I found a lot of these next flowers at the arboretum.I love these purple flowers! Purple is a wonderful color, don’t you agree? 😀Sooo pretty!I always like seeing bees up close in photographs like this.
Such a lovely sunny picture!
One of our friends found this extremely odd-looking dandelion when we were on our Nature Walk today. Yes, all of those dandelion heads are on that one huge stem! (Although the stem got kind of split and smushed…)Warning: I may hyperventilate about these next few photos just a bit…AHH I LOVE DEW DROPS!AHH THEY MAKE ME SO HAPPY!I DON’T KNOW WHY BUT THEY REALLY DO!Ohhh this one might be my favorite. I took these pictures just after a rain when we were walking down to our pond to try to find the muskrat that lives there. (Unfortunately, we only caught a glimpse of him. 😦 )The phlox in our flowerbed and everyone else’s is simply breathtaking! They’re so brilliant and colorful!
That’s all for now, folks! At least I’ve made a dent in my pictures… but only a dent. It’s spring, so of course I can’t keep up! Whenever I post 10 pictures I take 20 more. XD
What do you think of my “Beautiful Things” series so far? Which was your favorite picture? DO YOU LOVE DEW DROPS TOO?! (*Ahem,* sorry.)
Guys, buckle up for a TON of pictures! This may be one of my longest posts to date. XD
It snowed last Monday/Tuesday, and I just went photo-wild. XD I got a few neat pictures of the snow, but most of the pictures were actually of icicles or ice. So anyway, have a seat and take a peek, won’t you?
Phew, I don’t know where to start! Let’s see. I guess I’ll start with some pretty, icy pictures.
Ice:
It looks like rain drops only… ice drops!
Love this one!The poor pussy willow buds got rather frozen. 😦
Next up…
Snow:
It didn’t snow very much, but it still looked pretty!Maggie!Heh heh, I drew this horribly deformed smiley face in the snow with water.
My three youngest siblings made this hilarious but cute snowman. XD After I took these pictures, they made him a “Snow Cool” sign.
They used icicles for the mohawk, a carrot for the nose (obviously), sunglasses for the… uh, sunglasses ( XD ) and a smear of dirt for the mouth.
After most of that snow had melted, what do you know? It snowed AGAIN! (And then melted super quickly but oh well.) The most amazing thing about this snow was the snowflakes. I mean, they weren’t even snowflakes, they were more like snowballs! They were the biggest flakes I have ever seen – a whole bunch of snowflakes bunched into a clump, some of which were quarter-sized or bigger. I tried frantically to get a good picture that showed how big they were, but I didn’t really get any. 😦 I did get some pretty pictures, though!
We have a nice view of this silo from our deck. 😀There you can kind of see how hard it was snowing!Fluffy. 🙂
Ooh, yay! Now I get to show you the…
Icicles
After we finished gathering eggs, I ran back to the house to get my camera. I noticed the lovely icicles hanging from the chicken house roofs, and I just HAD to get some pictures. 😉 I’m so glad I did! It took quite a bit of patience and a high shutter speed setting to capture the drops falling, but I had SO much fun experimenting!
Woohoo, two at once!
These icicles are on our house, and I took this picture at sunset.
And that leads us to…
Water Drops
After I had taken quite a few icicle photos, I noticed that the drops sliding off of them were splashing into a puddle. I decided it would be fun to take pictures of that too! Instead of kneeling down in the wet snow, though, I got a (rather dirty) measuring pitcher from the chicken house, brought out something to sit on, and started taking pictures. This also took quite a bit of patience, like the icicles. I got a whole bunch of blurry or boring pictures for every good one. But again, it was so exciting when I DID get a good one! Hee hee!
(Note: I edited these pictures a good bit – they didn’t look like this straight from the camera. 😉 )
And now for my very favorite one. ♥ Ohhh my goodness I love it so much!
And last but not least, we have…
Everything Else
I took several not-so-snowy pictures that I wanted to include too.
Quite a few robins were hopping around this puddle, waiting for spring to come, I guess. 🙂
I love how you can see his reflection.This was a fun one! I made everything black and white except for the robin’s pop of color.
I was pretty tickled to get this next picture. I saw two robins fighting in the puddle all of a sudden and quick pressed the button – and it actually worked! I love it when that happens. 🙂
This is neat, don’t you think?I rather like this one too.
I shall end with this promise of spring. This poor little beauty was stuck face down in the snow when I rescued her, but she’s still so bright and cheery for all that! Daffodils are such incredibly hardy, resilient flowers that can spring back after even such cold trials as this snow. Sometimes it’s hard to be a daffodil, isn’t it? It is for me…
Aaaaannnd I’m finished! Maybe it wasn’t so wise to put all those pictures in one post, but I just wanted to try and see how it worked. XD What do you think? Was that way too much or did you heartily enjoy seeing all those photos at once? Or are you indifferent? XD
If you actually got through the whole thing, which category or picture was your favorite?
I absolutely love Clara’s random photography posts, so I thought I would try to do a similar kind since I have plenty of random photos anyway. 🙂 I hope you enjoy!
Random Topic #1: Spring
I was about to say that spring is on the way, but then again, it’s 29 degrees outside, so… XD But the daffodils are blooming and the grass is getting green, so you at least THINK spring is here until you go outside.
Ohhhh pictures like this make me happy with the golden sunshine on the green, green grass. So pretty!
Random Topic #2: Bonfire Days
I already wrote a post about a huge bonfire we had recently, but there were a few extra bonfire-related photos I didn’t show.
The fire was so hot that we couldn’t get close enough to roast hot dogs, so my grandaddy though of an ingenious solution! He hauled out some long, hollow metal poles and stuck the roasting sticks in the end. That way you could move them around from a safe distance. XD My uncle and brother, not to be outdone, just got up close to the fire and shielded themselves by putting their jackets over their heads. It was quite the hilarious scene, but it worked!
Oh, and we also cooked potatoes, but the photo of that was terrible, so I decided to leave it out. 😉 But that’s a really fun thing to do at a bonfire: wrap a few potatoes in aluminum foil, poke some holes in them with a fork, and bury them in hot coals from the fire. Apparently we left ours in a bit too long, because they had a nice thick shell of blackened potato around the edges ( XD XD ), but they were quite tasty in the middle! Hee hee!
Isn’t this picture so funny? XD
Megan and I took pictures of each other taking pictures of each other. That was confusing. XD
Aww, Maggie dear!
Another fun thing we did was play with glow sticks. We started by tossing them around out in the field, and discovered that if the person carrying the glow stick ran far enough into the darkness, the glow stick really looked like it was floating when they waved it around. It was so weird. After that, we cracked some of them open and drew on our hands. XD Probably NOT the wisest idea, because there is actually a tube of glass inside glow sticks that cracks too when you break it. So yeah, maybe not a good thing to “try at home”… but it was fun while it lasted! XD And it looked really weird – like you were glowing from the inside out.
Random Topic #3: Eyes
If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you might have noticed that I really like photographing and drawing eyes. I think they’re fascinating, and extra beautiful up close! I had fun editing these photos.
Ohhh my goodness I love this photo so much! This is my friend’s eye, which I edited to look bluer than it really is. (But it is still so beautiful in real life!)
Eh, the pictures of my eye aren’t nearly as pretty, but I like all the different rings of color. 🙂 My eyes are definitely brown from a distance, but colorful up close.
This is a fun angle! It makes my eyelashes look super long, hehe. O.o XD
Random Topic #4: A Beauteous Sunset
Even if you haven’t been following my blog for very long, you might know that I also have a weakness for sunsets. XD I love how they’re all different, but all glorious (well, most of them)! I took these pictures at my grandparent’s house. The sunset was quite unique that night – the clouds looked like a washboard or something!
I edited this one (as you can tell).
Random Topic #5: Yummy Lemon Pies
Mom found this delicious recipe in the latest edition of “The Magnolia Journal” magazine. I tried it out, and it was pretty yummy and VERY rich. 🙂 One thing that we noticed is it could use a little bit more lemon juice next time. I didn’t fill the 2/3 cups super full since I was squeezing real lemons and I wanted to have an extra lemon for garnish.
I am quite happy with how the editing turned out on these photos. They still aren’t anything extraordinary, but they sure are better than this: *shudder* I did lots of different things, but some of the main ones were cooling the temperature of the photo, boosting highlights, and using the fancy focus and miniature effects.
Ugh. 😦
Random Topic #6: Party Food
While we’re on the topic of food… XD
This has been a while – my little sister’s birthday was the middle of January, heh heh. XD But anyway, better late than never, right? My mom always makes us a custom cake, and my sister chose a fox. Mom saw this great idea for a coconut fox cake on Pinterest, and it turned out adorable! She also made fox cupcakes, but I didn’t get pictures of those.
For my sister’s birthday supper she chose bananas as one of her sides. 😀 I had fun playing around with banana “tattoos” to make them more special 😛 It’s actually really simple: just poke holes in the peel with a toothpick, and soon the holes will darken by themselves. So fun!
Ugh, sorry about the bad lighting.
Random Topic #7: Uh… I’m Not Sure What to Call This…
Heh heh. I just had two lonely pictures leftover, which I took on the day of the rabbit photoshoot. So here they are!
Well that was rather anti-climatic. XD
Well, that’s about it, folks! So what do you think? Do you like this kind of post? What was your favorite random topic?
Allison Marie 