How are your photos coming along for the COLOR photography assignment? I’ve received a bunch of really great submissions already. Where are yours? If you need a wee bit of inspiration, check out this gallery HERE, or THIS Flickr group, or THIS one, or THIS one. Or just study your own surroundings with your creative eye set on “color.”
Your best 7 photos are due by Sunday evening, April 15. Email them to me at 39DegN@gmail.com and put the word COLOR in the subject line.
We’re heading into dramatic sky/weather season here on the margin between the plains and the mountains. We had our first tornado warning of the season on Wednesday and I, of course, went running outside with my camera hoping to capture a photo or two of a funnel cloud, but no such luck. We were tornado-warning-free last evening, but the sky was pretty cool anyway.
What with spring springing up just about everywhere (at least here in the northern hemisphere), I thought this might be a good time to focus on COLOR. We’ve had several assignments here that involved SPECIFIC colors, but this one involves color in general.
Your mission for this assignment is to take photos in which COLOR is the primary subject. It can be a single color, various shades of one color, a couple of colors or lots of colors. Walk around your world, camera in hand, with your mind and your eye focused on color and see what jumps out at you. Get in close and fill the frame with color if you can. BE CREATIVE with color.
The rules for the assignment are, as always, quite simple:
That’s it. If you’re in, start taking your COLOR pics now. Sometime between now and Sunday evening, April 15, email up to SEVEN of your favorites to me at 39DegN@gmail.com and put “COLOR” in the subject line. Please send your photos to me as large as possible and if I don’t already know your name, be sure to include it so I can give you credit. Feel free to include captions if you wish, but they are not required. The results of this assignment will be posted in the blog on Tuesday, April 17.
As always with these assignments, please keep in mind that you don’t need a fancy schmancy camera to play along. DSLR, point-and-shoot, camera phone… it doesn’t matter. My photography assignments are just for fun and to help you become a better photographer by training your eye to see specific things or by practicing certain techniques. There’s no critique involved, no judges, no winners, no prizes… just photos of COLORNESS with whatever camera you have available.
OK, let’s get busy!
Here are a few examples from my archives:
Here are a few more of the wildflowers-that-aren’t-bluebonnets that can be found along the Texas highways and byways.
An Evening Primrose of some sort
Bellardia
Blue-Eyed Grass
Pink Evening Primrose (in Texas, aka Buttercup - not sure why - nothing buttery about that)!
More Blanket Flowers
Another Texas Paintbrush
Texas Vervain
Pink Spiderwort
Puccoon
Yet another Texas Paintbrush
During my quest for bluebonnets on Friday, I was delighted at the amazing variety of wildflowers to be found right there on the sides of the roads. While everyone around here is hyper-focused on finding just the PERFECT patch of bluebonnets, I imagine that they completely overlook the abundance of other lovely flowers to be found.
Many of the flowers I found were the same as or similar to flowers that we have in Colorado, but there were also quite a few that were completely new to me. Thanks to the Wildflower Index on a great website by Gary Regner Photography, I was able to identify most of the unfamiliar blooms. Here are a few of the familiar ones as well as some of the new ones:
Herbertia
Blanket Flower
Blue Pimpernel
Scarlet Pimpernel
Wine Cup
Spiderwort
Texas Paintbrush
Ten-Petal Anemone
Texas Dandelion
Texas Paintbrush
Drummond Phlox
That’s all for today. Check out Part II of Texas Wildflowers That Aren’t Bluebonnets tomorrow!
This weekend finds me in Texas and yesterday my BFF and I went in search of bluebonnets. I lived in Texas for several years and not once in that time did I go out to look at/photograph the bluebonnets, so it was time.
Texas Bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis) is a variety of lupine endemic to Texas and is also the state flower of Texas. The Texas State Legislature apparently had a 70-year-long debate over specifically which species of bluebonnet would be named as the state flower. I’m told that the bluebonnets are not all that great this year, but since I have no frame of reference, they looked awesome to me.
Bluebonnets and Paintbrush
Bluebonnets and Cow Butts
Skyline Drive is an interesting diversion if you ever find yourself in the Cañon City, Colorado area. Built in 1905 by inmates from the adjacent Colorado Territorial Prison, Skyline Drive snakes its way across the crest of a large hogback west of town. The very narrow, one-way road begins at a Craftsman-style stone arch, which was constructed in the 1930s and contains rocks from all 48 of the US states that existed at the time.
The hogback here is part of the Dakota Hogback that stretches along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains all the way from Wyoming down into New Mexico. The hogback is comprised of sediments that were washed down from the Ancestral Rockies, then uplifted during the Laramide Orogeny beginning approximately 70-80 million years ago.
As you begin the drive up the road, it’s hard to imagine that this route actually used to be a two-way road. This is a seriously narrow road with steep drop-offs and no guardrails, so if you’re at all intimidated by heights (or depths), it might not be a good idea to attempt to drive on this road.
About a mile into the drive, you will come upon an area known as the Dinosaur Trackway. In 1999, University of Colorado paleontology student, William Kurtz, discovered a large set of dinosaur footprints imbedded in the rocks at the top of the ridge.
According to the Dinosaur Depot Museum’s website:
These tracks were made during the early Cretaceous Period, approximately 107 million years ago. During that time this area was on the edge of the Western Interior Seaway. A group of dinosaurs were walking side by side through the mud along the edge of an estuary, probably eating the plants. The tracks were then filled in by sand and plant debris, which hardened to preserve them as casts of the actual tracks. After the sediments were deposited, the walls of the basin were raised by the Rocky Mountain uplift that tilted the rocks on edge. This explains why they bulge out instead of being a depression like one normally thinks of as a “footprint”.
I find it utterly amazing that this road was heavily used for close to 100 years before someone discovered that there were dinosaur footprints right there all along!!
While not for the faint-of-heart, the drive along Skyline Drive is definitely worth the trip.
I don’t know if it’s my Dutch heritage or what, but I just ADORE tulips. I get so excited when the first of my tulips pops open and here it is!
