After a rough day with Turbo Tax I’m falling back on the archives again. This Golden Crowed sparrow was kind enough to pose in a tree. Most of them were on the ground. From North Mountain Park last week.
Another one from John O’Donohue:
Beauty is mysterious, a slow presence who waits for the ready, expectant heart.
I’ve been saving this one for a rainy day. Well, it’s not exactly rainy but kind of grey and ugly and I have been up to my ears in genealogy all day so here are some beautiful pink blossoms from an ornamental tree down the street.
And from the Navajo tradition:
May you walk in beauty.
I don’t even know what kind of flower this is but I found it blooming in one of my neighbors beds next to the street. The raindrops just added a little extra something.
Today’s quote is from Blaise Pascal:
In difficult times you should always carry something beautiful in your mind.
In case you wondered most of the quotes I’m posting come from a book by John O’Donohue simply titled Beauty. It has been languishing on my to read shelf for some time and I thought this would be as good a time as any to get ‘er done.
It’s raining today in Southern Oregon so I just popped out the back door to see how my Camelia bush was doing. Everything from new buds like this one to full flowers laying on the ground.
from Confucious:
Everything has beauty but not everyone sees it.
The willows along the Greenway are a in varying stages of development.
From John O’Donahue:
“The Human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere – in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion and in ourselves. When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming.”
Here are some blossoms to remind us that spring is here and there is beauty everywhere in spite of it all. Get out there and take it in. The air is fresh and clean. It’s people you need to avoid not being outdoors as I have heard some express.
Having come back from the Great Smokey Mountains with nearly 1500 new images in my files it was pretty hard to choose and image of the week this week. This one may not be the best but it was hard won as I had to hike a ways up a steep hill to get to the falls. It was worth the trip, as you can see, and I even had them to myself for all of five minutes. Not bad for a national park.
I’m so happy that spring is finally here! So many flowers, so little time. My newest Lensbaby lens is the Burnside 35mm which has a really close focusing distance so though it is a wide angle makes for some new and interesting approaches to flower. I added one texture to ad a little more interest to the background.
I knew this was going to be the image of the week after I took it a week ago but I never got around to publishing it. I seem to be very undisciplined about my photography lately so I’m thinking about taking myself in hand to do another 100 days project. The theme for this one will be 100 days of flowers. I have to get started right away as this will take me into October as it is. I should have started 15 or 20 days ago! But this is spontaneous so what the heck. I’ll just see where it leads me. The good news is I have a garden tour coming up at the end of July so that should play right into my theme. This Bumblebee, by the way, was captured at North Mountain Park in Ashland.
A neighbor gifted me with some beautiful peonies. So, of course, I took them straight to the tiny studio for photographing. I am also breaking in a new computer so it was a good test of whether I have everything working right. Aside from the brushes needing to be reloaded in Photoshop I’m doing well. But I just realized I’m going to have to load Notepad before I can post this to my website. Love the new computer. Hate the hassle of getting things back to normal.
Anyway. I shot this with the Lensbaby Velvet 85. Took it through Nik detail extractor, did some noise reduction, had to brighten one side so used masks on the part that didn’t need it. And I used the spot healing brush to hide some blemishes on the outer petal. Oh, and I cropped in to get rid of an ugly grey background. Overall. I’m pretty pleased with the result.