Some days I step outside, look around, and go right back in for my camera because it’s too beautiful not to. I love just walking around, taking pictures of the little beauties I find. Because that’s how to be a good photographer, you know. You have to go looking for photo opportunities, not just wait for them to find you.
Sometimes the best photos are of the little things no one else takes time to notice. I like to think that through your camera lens, anything can be beautiful. ♥ Even thorns.
I love how these pictures turned out! Who knew raindrops on asparagus plants could look so neat? 😀
Beautiful zinnias…
I’m a little proud of these next pictures. XD I just LOVE how the raindrops reflect color onto the Japanese beetles!
Sparrows on a barn roof. 🙂
Phew, that was a lot of pictures! I hope you enjoyed them, dears. 🙂
BUT WAIT! Before you go, could you do me a favor? I’m entering some photographs in our county fair, but I can’t decide which of these to enter in each category. Would you mind voting for your favorites in the comments?
Wildlife:
Should I do…
1. The butterfly?
2. The snail?
Rural _________
1. Mountain?
2. Golden dust? XD
3. Fall evening?
People:
1: My dad?
2. My sister? (I would crop and edit this a little bit more.)
Landscape:
Should I do this sunset…
Or one of the Rural ______ ones?
Thank you guys so much!
Would you like to see a post of the rest of the pictures/items I’m entering in the fair?
Do you like photographing little things and raindrops?
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.)
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?
The other day I went out to take some photos at “the golden hour” as we photographers call it. Heh heh. Maggie came along to protect me from sunburn or vicious groundhogs or something… or perhaps she was just bored. XD
We have a grand old maple in our front yard that’s usually the first to turn colors.
Even though the year is going down in flames, you could say, there were still some bright, spring-like greens around.
Maggie trotted faithfully along beside me and guarded me while I sat and took pictures. ♥ She was on the lookout for those vicious groundhogs, I suppose. XD
The sun turned my hair really a bright red. It’s a little bit reddish-goldish like this in real life, but not this bright! (Yes, I know, rather random pictures. But it was fun!)
Please excuse the photobombers (Maggie and my toes).
It’s kind of awkward when you’re trying to photograph your hair (for some reason) so you hold a strand in front of your face and then your dog comes over to make sure you’re not paralyzed or something since you haven’t gotten up for the past 30 seconds or so… *Sigh* XD
You can see the gorgeous sky peeking through the grass in this one. That was probably one of the prettiest skies I’ve seen not counting sunsets!
I love this picture because 1.) look at the bokeh and 2.) look at the cute wittle spiderweb garland hung on the grass! The spiders must have been having a welcome party for autumn.
And lastly but not leastly, I shall leave you with an extremely hilarious picture of Maggie trying to chase down an itch. XD XD XD
BWAHAHAHAHA! Sooo funny!
So there you go. Photos from the golden hour on a golden day in the golden season. Gold is nice, don’t you think?
***Allison***
P. S. Sometimes I don’t like fall because it’s too beautiful. 😛 But seriously, do you ever have that feeling when something’s so beautiful you can’t stand it so you whip out your camera in a frantic attempt to save some of the beauty and capture it forever and that helps a little bit but it’s still just too much? Or is that just me…
Bonjour! (Or hola, since I’ve been studying Spanish…)
I’ve wanted to do a lyric photoshoot for a long time, and I finally got around to it! I love the song “Undeniable” by TobyMac because it’s so uplifting, and so true. Especially on these gorgeous autumn days it’s easy to see God’s “evidence piling up” in the beautiful world he created for us. Click the play button on the video below, then enjoy the rest of the post while listening!
*********************
There are moments that I doubt You. Blind to the beauty that surrounds me, I try to push away the need that I’m needin’ proof. And this struggle that I have, it ain’t nothing new.
But the evidence is piling up, yup. You change my heart isn’t that enough?
You give me life that I can’t take credit for; Call me to walk through an open door.
Undeniable, You are, You are, You are; Unmistakable, You are, You are.
You’re the bright and morning star, But still You speak to my heart. Undeniable, You are, You are.
Your work doesn’t stop with me – Your signature’s on everything we see.
From the hills of Negril, Jamaica, To the kid that the doctor said would never make it. Which is harder to believe: that You don’t exist, Or that You orchestrated all of this?
Living in the world that is so confusing, You’re the argument I’m never losing. ‘Cause I believe.
Undeniable, You are, You are, You are; Unmistakable, You are, You are.
You’re the bright and morning star, But still You speak to my heart. Undeniable, You are, You are.
From the hymns that my Daddy sang, I know I was made to glorify Your name.
And from the prayers that my Momma prayed, I know I was made to glorify Your name. [x3]
So undeniable, You are, You are, You are; Unmistakable, You are, You are.
You’re the bright and morning star, But still You speak to my heart. Undeniable, You are, You are. [x2]
You’re the bright and morning star, But still You speak to my heart. Undeniable, You are, You are. [x2]
Which is harder to believe: that You don’t exist,
Or that you orchestrated all of this?
Living in the world that is so confusing,
You’re the passion that I’m never losing.
*********************
I love that line: Which is harder to believe: that You don’t exist/ Or that you orchestrated all of this? Seriously! Which makes more sense: that a Creator God designed our incredibly complex and beautiful world, or that God doesn’t exist and everything just happened to evolve this way?
Living in the world that is so confusing,/ You’re the passion that I’m never losing.
If you recall, Hayley and I just recently started a collab series called Art Lab, where we post art inspiration and our art. (Read our first post here.) It’s my turn to post today, so I present… Episode 2: Dewdrops!
I have both a word prompt and a photo prompt for today’s inspiration. Bonus point! XD
Prompts:
The word prompt is *drum roll please* dewdrops! I love dewdrops!
The photo prompt is a picture I took recently of grass bedecked with dew drops. Ahh…. 😀 (See more dew pictures in this post.)
Art:
This card I made looks sort of like the photo prompt, only I didn’t see the words “Happy Birthday” floating in the grass photo. XD
Here are a few tips for making the card:
Hang a dewdrop from any curved part of a letter, and if you really want to sprinkled them on, add some to a horizontal line as well (like on the cross of the “H”).
Once you’ve colored the grass with different green colored pencils, you may need to trace over some of the grass blades again with a pencil to sharpen their outlines.
To make the grass in the front look closer to you, make the dewdrops sharper and darker, and make the ones hanging from the back grass more faded.
________________
I also drew this snail-on-a-leaf ATC which uses the word prompt.
A few tips for drawing this:
I drew this using different “levels” of pencils. I used a 5B pencil for some of the darker parts, like the shading of the dewdrops and the leaf stem. The higher up you go in B pencils, the softer and darker they will draw, and the higher up you go in H pencils, the harder and lighter they will draw. (For instance, a 6B pencil has a really soft lead that draws a fuzzy, dark line. A 9H pencil has a really hard lead that draws a sharp, faint line. Normal pencils are usually somewhere in the middle of the two.)
Play around with the design inside of the snail’s shell.
You don’t have to do this in pencil! Try using markers, watercolors, or colored pencils.
Thanks for joining me! I hope you were inspired to go make some art!
The other morning I went outside and there was a dew drop clinging to almost every blade of grass. It was beautiful! So I had to take some pictures, of course.
Allison Marie 