I haven’t taken any applicable pictures this week unless my crazy wild girl counts as wildlife I post TONS of wildlife pictures here already so this was harder than you might think! So I’m cheating and posting pictures that I had already posted to my personal blog but not here. There is this awesome park in Austin where the peacocks just roam wild. They call the park home and they are protected. It was so much fun to go eat our picnic lunch there and play amongst the peacocks. most fun of all is that they were so used to people that getting really good close-up pictures was possible.

For more Wild & Crazy Wildlife, check out the Land of K.A. for Theme Thursday

Funny story. I went to the botanical gardens today in blistering heat dargging along both my cameras (My P&S specifically because it takes WAY more awesome macros than my DSLR thanks to my distinct lack of a macro lens) specifically to get some good flowering photos but nothing seemed to be flowering! Lots of green but not much by way of other colors. Except the roses.

I really really dislike roses. A lot. They are so cliche. I am just not a fan. I didn’t want them in my wedding, I don’t want them for Valentine’s Day, I don’t buy them for my home. So of course the roses are what I had to work with.

Later we went to another park that had MUCH better color but I didn’t realize there were gardens at all on the grounds so I didn’t bring in my great macro-shooter. All I had to work with was my DSLR.

So the top two pictures are from the DSLR and the bottom, well, roses are from the Point ‘n Shoot.

See more beautiful flowers to brighten your day at the Land of K.A.: Theme Thursday

Well I intended to go out into rural Texas (which frankly is ALL of Texas pretty much) and find me some awesome barns to shoot but post-vacation business got the best of me so here I am posting what I already had. I really do love this assignment and hope to revisit it in the near future on my own because I only just recently, within the last year or so, started to see value in shooting things that are old and juxtaposing them with things that are new. I never understood the appeal, now I do. But my eye rarely goes to those things and I rarely remember to look for those shots. I’m getting better but verrrry slowly. So this is all I’ve got, from my recent Mother’s Day picture series.

This is when I first moved into our new house. I loved all the rusty metal and weathered wood contrasting with our “new” yard and home:

Bonus: this is aged via post-processed. Usually I’m not a fan of the sepia and the post-process aging but I had this photo I loved that was otherwise too grainy to use. I really like how this one turned out

See many more aged photos over at the Land of K.A.’s Theme Thursday!

I spent Mother’s Day on the beach in full sun so had lots of opportunities to play around with the sun. There wasn’t a beautiful sunset to work with but I had fun experimenting with silhouettes:

Other than the vignette, they are both SOOC so I probably could have enhanced the silhouette effect better with Photoshop.

See more creative uses for sunshine at the Land of KA : Theme Thursday

Do you remember that 60′s horror flick “The Birds”? That was the first scary movie I saw (ahem, many years after it was made, I might add) and it took me YEARS to get up the guts to watch the entire thing beginning to end. Freak-y.

These are Laughing Gulls, not crows. Way cooler.

BONUS:

{brown pelican}

{this would have been a lot cooler if both the pelican AND the dolphin were in focus}

{turns out they weren’t playing, they were “playing”}

{one shy hermit crab}

{many shy hermit crabs}

{not so shy}

{cute baby crab}

{curious about this cute baby crab}

{about 3 seconds before she dropped and ran}

BONUS:

{nature, but not}

Before (SOOC):

After:

After: The Caterpillar

The story: Addy is very curious about insects and critters. We found this little slug which she found most disgusting. She was not happy with the slug. But when we found this caterpillar she was quite excited. They became fast friends.

* you, too, can join in Stacy’s awesome Theme Thursdays each week. I chose to focus on before & after as it relates to mood. Here’s my Before & After as it relates to post-processing:

SOOC:

Post-processed:

The original was so blown out that I just couldn’t do much with it without taking the time and effort to open up photoshop (whew! I’m panting already from the exhaustion of it all! ha). So I played around with softness, a white matte and desaturated it to about 25%, all through Picnik. My goal was to try to convey the tender moment a little better. I posed it to my blog and was really shocked at the positive response it got since I liked it for about 5 seconds before I decided I didn’t. haha.