Often times I return to my 'roots' in photography - flower photography. I've always had a love for shooting up close, and flowers are often the subject when I am shooting up close. On our recent trip to Cloudland Canyon State Park, we spent an afternoon hanging out at one of the playgrounds just chilling while the park ranger was at our cabin with the air conditioning company replacing the entire air conditioning system (if that's news to you, you might want to go back a few Sunday blog posts). Anyway, it was a relaxing afternoon and not long before Jim and I starting looking at the various flowers growing wild and taking some photographs.
Most of the time people photograph dandelion flowers when they are finished flowering and have all the little seeds still intact. That looks more like what you see below.
But, sometimes you see a dandelion that has already lost a good number of the seeds and has a "bald spot". Since this is the less often version seen, I think it has more interest.
One other wild flower caught my eye as we relaxed around a picnic table.
For all of these images, looking closely at what is behind the flower and using a shallow depth of field, allowed for a nice blur of color without any actual objects being included in the photograph. This is a preferred way to photograph flowers to have them stand out.