Our photo shoot on Thursday ...

was an absolute bust!  I got what I thought was a good tip about flowers in a park, went there - NO FLOWERS!  After dinner, we checked on another spot which will be the Friday flower shoot!  We're going to try to catch the FIREWORKS at the air show at Temple airport tonight too!

The Colors of WILD!

I created these layouts as background paper for my book "The colors of WILD!"  Each left hand page will have a stamped and hand colored image of the wildflower.  (bluebonnet, Indian Paintbrush, spiderwort, prickly poppy, and Indian blanket).  Right hand pages will have the same background photo without the text, and a mat for your personal photos of the specimen plants!  I hope to get the book completed by early next week.  When it is complete, I

will post the pages on my paper crafting blog

http://pokisprojects.blogspot.com

After I printed the pictures, I decided that the picture I had chosen for the title page printed WAY TOO DARK!  I lightened it, and printed again on both the matte photo paper I'm using in the book, and some glossy paper too, and decided it was still too dark, so I changed the photo!  I think this new one will make a much more dramatic cover page anyway!

I like this picture just as well, and since it was taken in FULL SUN, it prints much brighter in the book! 

I removed my original YELLOW page - I decided that I just had to call it RED instead since my favorite wildflower book classifies the Indian Blanket as a RED flower!!!!  So I had to re-create a YELLOW page too!

I changed the YELLOW PICTURE TOO!  This is my second YELLOW page!  It prints better!

One more bluebonnet pix - for now! 4/12/2010 in Temple

Here is one more bluebonnet pix that I really like.  I edited it last weekend in "greenie" to use in my wildflower 2010 book, but wasn't able to load anything to Facebook, or my Blog from the Rockin' R.  The satellite wifi is always tempermental when it rains, which it did most of the weekend.

This picture was taken in an open field set back from FM 2305 which is West Adams in Temple, heading out toward the lake.  We drove past this field tonight on the way to dinner to see if it had escaped the dreaded LAWN MOWERS. and surprisingly the flowers were still there!  Taller and thicker I believe than they were last week when we were there for photos!

Flower Safari - 4/20/2010

On Tuesday, April 20, we did photos in two places - at the Corps office by Belton Dam (and the park behind it) and also on FM 439 heading toward Killeen

Black-foot daisies - this is their first week to bloom - I was watching for them.  The cluster grows off one main stem!  They love to be in rocky soil, which makes this stretch of FM 439  perfect for them!

These Indian paintbrushes were extremely vibrant, living in FULL SUN with no chance of shade ever!  The sun isn't so good for the bluebonnets though, they were a little faded looking in this spot!

These Indian paintbrushes were in an area with primarily paintbrushes only - on a few bluebonnets mixed in at the Park by Belton Dam!

These Indian paintbrushes were a rosy PINK instead of ORANGE, living right in the middle of a patch of orange ones!

The pink ones are right in the center of this photo! 

A nice patch of bluebonnets beside FM 439 - I pass by them almost everyday going to Killeen and back!

This plant is called Foxglove, and is the natural source for the medicine Digitalis!  I find they are much prettier inside the cup than outside!

A lovely cluster of Foxglove at the base of a Live Oak Tree.

This Foxglove was a more vibrant purple than the others, although they were all growing in the same cluster!

Here are those gold flowers again - fully open this time! - and I still don't know what they are!  NOTE:  I borrowed my neighbor's wildflower book (like mine that is MIA) and discovered that this flower is STIFF-STEM FLAX! (The same type of plant from which linen fabric is manufactured!)

More pictures from Stillhouse Hollow Dam road - 4/19/2010

Here are a few more pictures that I have edited from our photo safari to Stillhouse Hollow Dam road on Monday, April 19, 2010

This one was LAVENDER, not blue - I had never seen one quite this color before.

A couple of PINKS slipped into this group!  Beautiful!

There are lots of yellow "daisy like" flower mixed in at this time of year!

I'm not sure what these gold flower are, but I'll find out as soon as I find my wildflower reference book - it's MIA.  I would know exactly where it is if I had just left it in the car, which is where it belongs!

Another "Flower Safari" - Monday, April 19

On Monday, Mike and poki headed over to Stillhouse Hollow Dam road for a photo shoot in the field beside the Corps of Engineers office.  The flowers were beautiful!  The day was over-cast (almost raining) most of the day, so I had to experiment with the white balance adjustment.  In the camera, everything looked OVER-SATURATED, but I discovered that wasn't true when I saw the pictures on the computer monitor.  I was able to adjust the pictures without losing too much of the clarity of the photos!  I was pleased with the way these photos turned out!

Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrush

I love the mix of colors!

Hello! I'm back ...

with a new camera NIKON P-90.  My previous camera had an UNFORTUNATE meeting with a concrete floor in Kyle on Feb 27!  Repairable, but the minimum charge at Nikon was almost the cost of the camera, so that was definitely out of the question.  We left Precision Camera in Austin with the new camera the same day! 

And then I had to wait for FLOWER SEASON to arrive in Texas - and it did, the last week in March!  Mike and poki have been out several times for photo ops!  And we will be doing it again tomorrow IF it doesn't rain!  (Rain is predicted!) 

Here are the results of some of our "Flower Adventures" this year -

April 3 - we drove over to Burnet and down 281 through Marble Falls to Johnson City, then 290 through Dripping Springs, Driftwood, Kyle and then on to San Marcos for the night.  The flowers were just beginning to show, but we found a couple of interesting photo ops, especially just north of Marble Falls in a roadside park:

Bluebonnets -

I'm not sure what this one is - but the formation of the plant is beautiful, I think!

Prickly Poppy (very thistle like!)

Yucca