Rise and Shine :)

Instead of heading straight to work today, I took a detour over to Dow's Lake to snap some shots of Ottawa's famous tulips during sunrise.

Beautiful warm light and unexpected flare :)

Real flare (unlike all the fake photoshop stuff I see so regularly....)

Not the nicest of shots, nor the prettiest of the tulips, but I LOVE the orange and purple flowers together!
I spent some time trying to capture the spider webs strung between flowers. These next 2 shots are about as good as it gets (sadly). Something to work on in the future!
I love how the sun is shining just on the tips of the petals. It was pretty in colour but I preferred it in B&W.

In Bloom

The peony I planted a couple of weeks ago is in bloom!

This isn't a great flower shot but I liked the bokeh :)

Can you find the bug?

I loved this one in B&W.


This was the first shot I took, before adjusting the settings.
It's such a mess I think it's gorgeous :)

Stop and smell the....lilacs

I picked some lilacs from my garden today so we could enjoy them inside. They smell SO nice!
Even Blue seems to be enjoying them :)

Focus Fun

Squiggly

So, I chose this week's theme for the photo contest (bokeh) only to learn that I couldn't really take the kind of shot I wanted to with the lenses that are currently part of my family (of lenses!); I had hoped to pick up the 50 mm 1.8 but it wasn't in stock so I set off to give it a try with my mother's newly acquired 60 mm macro - WHAT A LENS! I loved it and am happy that she has agreed to let me borrow it for a few more days! As you know, my parents live out in the sticks so I wandered around for over an hour outside in the cold this afternoon, just taking shots of anything, everything, and nothing! Here are a couple of shots I took....there will be more to follow...I'm going to make this photo expedition last ALL week :)
In the first, the only editing I did was to crop it a bit and increase the contrast somewhat; all that's in focus is the squiggly little branch.

In this one, I processed it a little differently (same as above in addition to using the 'cross process' function in picnik) and I'm really liking how it turned out; notice that only a teeny tiny portion of the branch in the bottom right corner is in focus - like I said, I had so much fun playing with this lens and I'm a big fan of anything 'abstract' and I feel like these shots fit into that category!