A Pile Of Clouds

This is in response to Cee’s Fun Photo Challenge, Piles or Stacks. 🙂 The clouds the other day looked like they were piled on top of one another. It was so cool. And even cooler for me because with my new glasses, the edges of the clouds were so clear and the edges so sharp. 😀 (I always thought the edges of clouds were fuzzy so this was a little bit shocking to discover. 😆) I took quite a few photos and wanted to show how the pile of clouds changed over time:

If you look closely at the top right of this photo, you can see a dragonfly that photobombed me. 😁 I have other photos that I took of him in between taking photos of the clouds that I’ll share later. 😉

Isn’t it amazing how they change? It’s so fun to cloud gaze. ❤

Advertisement

Playing With Fire – Again

Yup, I’m playing with fire again. 😅 Last time was when my uncles were burning old magazines and newspapers. This time, it was a burn barrel with sticks. 🙂 The photo challenge this week from Dutch Goes The Photo is Heat, and here is my entry.  😀

Zoomed out shot of the fire in the barrel.

Zoomed in shot of the fire. It was hard to photograph fire because it jumped all over the place. It refused to stay still!

But I enjoy a challenge, and after about 100 photos, these were probably the best shots. I like the way the fire looks behind that stick. Whimsical and wispy.

Is it just me, or can you almost make out an angel in there?

And lastly, here are a few experimental shots of the fire that my camera did with the special effects. Sadly, I don’t know what the different effects are called:

Rainbow-like effects.

Reminds me of really old photos. I especially like how this one turned out for some reason.

Ever wondered what fire looks like in black and white? Well, wonder no more! 😉

I had a lot of fun playing with fire that day. Hope you enjoyed seeing the results of that. 🙂

Shining Yellow Lilies

Dutch Goes The Photo’s photo challenge last week was “shine” – though I fear I’m a bit late in posting for the challenge. 😅 My yellow lilies seem to almost glow in the dark in these photos – as if the flowers were made of sunshine. 🙂

And here is a glimpse of the journey that they took to get there:

Plants but the buds are not visible yet.

The plants are bigger but the buds are still too small to see.

Here come the buds!

Fully grown buds – it was only a matter of days. 😀

Hello, yellow Asian Lily! 😍 One of my favorite flowers! God added such detail to the petals.<3 In addition to these, I have orange ones, which are also open now (keep your eyes peeled, that post will probably come later this week), and red ones that are a little further behind and will probably open at the beginning of June. I bought pink ones this year and they already opened and died back. (If you missed them, you can see them here.) I hope to add a new color every year! I really want purple, but I’ve never seen them locally… but I’ve never seen one I didn’t like so I’m sure I’ll find something. 😁

---

Also, on a different note, I want to thank you all for the support – I got this in my notifications bell a few days ago:

And a special thanks to Keri L, who told me that my posts weren’t showing up in the reader because I was using too many tags and categories. ❤ Looks like it’s working now and people are seeing my posts. 🙂

A Golden Sunset And Other Nighttime Photography

These are photos that I hinted at last week that I was posting this week – photos of a sunset, taken over a 30 minute period of time. It’s so interesting to see how the colors changed!

The sunset started with beautiful golden colors!

When I backed off the zoom, it didn’t look as golden; but you can see the purples and pinks overhead.

I also love how the clouds were kind of layered on the sky.

This is an attempt to reflect the sunset off the mudhole. It kinda worked…? 😆

It was still very golden near the horizon.

And so pink and purple overhead!

But then, the pinks and purples overhead started to creep into the golden layers. It was so captivating!

And it happened so quickly. The pink and purple horizon only lasted what seemed like ten minutes. I didn’t have a watch out there with me, so I’m just guessing.

The pinks and purples started turning gray…

And then the sky just looked gray until the sunset was over. And this has been a visual storytelling of a sunset. 🙂

---

Also, because Cee’s challenge includes night-time photography this week, here are a couple of bonus photos that I took on different nights. These are among the first photos I took with my new camera back in September of 2017.

Raindrops

In response to the photo prompt, Shapes… circles! Here in Arkansas, we’ve been getting a lot of rain; so much, in fact, that few schools were closed due to flooding last week. I went outside to take some photos of the flooding and got stuck out there during a shower. Instead of running inside like a normal person, I hunched over the camera to try to shelter it from the water and took these photos because I thought it might be fun to see the circles as the raindrops hit the water. 😄

A Somber Lullaby

When Sonny and Lion couldn’t decide who got my lap, they decided to compromise and share… 😅

Life is a like ballad
Every melody has a story
The endings are at times sad
But that is how it must be

It pulls at the heartstrings
Creating a somber lullaby
All of the melancholy things
Like saying forever goodbye

I remember the notes, his singing
Every tone touched the heart
And with his story completing
He slowly pulled mine apart

 

---

 

I was browsing my old poems and stumbled upon this one that I wrote in 2015 for a gorgeous yellow tabby cat that I named Sonny. He died that year from either feline leukemia or some sort of feline aids, the vet wasn’t sure and said it wasn’t worth it to do the testing to find out because it wouldn’t make any difference. Anyway, we had many beautiful years together, and it was heartbreaking when it came to an end.

Sonny, sleeping in his “playing dead” position, which was his favorite

And later that year, another, a wonderful yellow long hair I called Lion ended up with the same thing and within a couple of months, was gone as well.

Lion, on my coat

My heart is feeling the same way now for Rabbit and Radar that it did for Sonny and Lion back then, so I thought, why not share this old poem for all of the beloved pets that have departed?

Thank you all for the prayers! ❤ I’m slowly trying to catch up on your wonderful posts and the lovely comments you’ve left me. 🙂 Hope that you are having a great week so far!

The Turtles And The Rabbit

Sounds a lot like The Tortoise And The Hare, doesn’t it? But this isn’t a fable, this is a post of photos from nature that I paired together; killing two weeks worth of photo challenges in one massive post. 😁 First are the turtles!

My mom found this one while raking leaves during the fall. He was hiding underneath the blanket of leaves.

He wasn’t scared of me at all and let me get this macro shot of his face. 🙂

And here is another one my mom found while raking leaves. (Apparently, turtles enjoy hiding under leaves. 😄) This was taken in transit to his new location, which was not too far away, just far enough away that he could escape to the woods without encountering my mom’s rake again.

He also let me get a close-up!

And they are even cuter as babies! Here is one that I found in 2015 that let me hold him in my hand.

And here is one I met in July of last year. So tiny!! This one wasn’t as friendly; he tried to eat my finger.  Don’t let his cuteness fool you; I thought he was a box turtle, but he snapped like a snapping turtle! 😂 But then, if some giant started wagging their finger in front of my face, I might get snappy too…

And this brings us to the Sienna or maybe sandy colored rabbit I met a few months ago. He has a mouthful of grass in this one.

He was trying to eat dinner while I crept closer.

He let me get very close; these were taken with my old camera with the 3X zoom zoomed in as close as I could get it.

But it wasn’t enough; he still got scared and tried to run away.

But he was too hungry to go far. I felt bad scaring the poor guy while he was trying to eat, but I really wanted to get photos, haha.

This is as close as I could get with my old camera; with my new one, I’ll be able to get really close without scaring him. I look forward to our next meeting! 🙂