13/52

The tulips are in full bloom at Memorial Gardens in Concord. With the warm weather, though, they're not lasting long.

12/52

Spring arrived early this year and the dogwoods are already in bloom.

11/52

Looking out the kitchen window of an old clubhouse on a friend's family property in South Carolina. Lots of old things to photograph on their land.

10/52

A gravel road in rural North Carolina. I used the Midnight filter in Nik Color Efex Pro while processing this image.

9/52

Late winter afternoon at Reedy Creek Park. Some of the trees in this area retain their dried up leaves throughout winter until the new ones replace them in the spring time. I have always thought it is beautiful to see these trees scattered throughout the wooded areas when all the other trees have no leaves at all. I think they're especially beautiful when they are back lit by the sun. They almost seem to glow. I often look for ways to try to capture these scenes, but am unable to do them justice. That's one of the challenges (and fun) of nature photography - trying to duplicate, in camera, the beautiful scenes found in nature. That's one of the reasons I return to the same places and photograph the same things time and time again.

Photography Fun

Though there are a lot of neat apps and plug-ins for photography, I'm generally not one who plays around with them much. Most of my pictures are pretty straight forward. I have, however, been playing around with a couple apps for my cell phone that I really like - Instagram and Hipstamatic. They do all kinds of crazy things to your pictures and I've been having a great time with them. I'm taking pictures of just about everything right now using these apps. The image quality isn't always the best and I haven't tried printing any, but it's still a lot of fun. The only thing that would be better is if these apps came in a plug-in format for Photoshop.

Here's a few I've taken with these apps. I'm sure I'll be posting more.

8/52

An old rusted car on a friend's property in South Carolina.