Challenge: The season of Spring

[Jonathan Long]

Here's a new challenge for all:

Photograph something that means "Spring" to you.

What are the rules you ask???

No Archive shots - the idea of the challenges is for photographers to go out and try photographing something to meet the criteria of that challenge - not sift through their archive of pictures!

Please include some caption material; location, date, names of people, camera settings...

Jon

[Jonathan Long]

I shot this about 15 minutes ago.

Nikon D2X, Sigma 24-60mm set at 60mm, f22 @ 60th sec. ISO 100

Jon

[Doug Kitchen]

313233
I shot these pictures last week. Some daffodils and tulips are up quite early this spring. all pictures were shot on a Pentax k100d with a fully manual vivitar 75-205 lens on macro.

The tulip was shot @ 1/45 possibly at F3.5. It was a shady, windy spot.

The daffodil was @1/500 - it was much sunnier. I was bracketing the aperture - this one was probably closer to 22. The last was overexposed at 1/350 but I like the closer up image

[Hannie Deventer]

These I took today.

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[Debi Peck]

Nothing says "Spring" to me like the Arizona desert in bloom. I am newly amazed every Spring when the different cacti (and other strange plants here!) begin to bloom.

These were all taken on Thursday at the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix. The camera I used was a Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z2. I have no idea what any of that means! LOL When my friends down in Tucson bought new cameras, they gave me their old one and I'm enjoying learning how to take pictures. I have no idea what settings I used.

[Judy Hamilton]

Jon
I am so undisciplined I do not know the camera settings I was about 15 ft from this apple tree in bloom
on a road out of Julian headed toward the High Desert esat of San Diego

[Dana Grant]

Wow, Judy, was it ever in bloom!!! Beautiful.

[Doug Kitchen]

313233
I shot these pictures last week. Some daffodils and tulips are up quite early this spring. all pictures were shot on a Pentax k100d with a fully manual vivitar 75-205 lens on macro.

The tulip was shot @ 1/45 possibly at F3.5. It was a shady, windy spot.

The daffodil was @1/500 - it was much sunnier. I was bracketing the aperture - this one was probably closer to 22. The last was overexposed at 1/350 but I like the closer up image
177178179

I took these on Friday in our front yard - the crab apple tree (I think that's what it is) was in full bloom. I had the same vivitar lens on. Nice sunny day so I could play with the aperture and the shutter speed. The bee pictures were on macro. The bees love this tree right now.

Since bees don't listen to instructions, I tried to focus on an area like the the center of the flower and adjust the aperture to get a good depth of field. I then used the shutter speed to control the light.

I think we have finally hit spring though not too far away in vermont they had 20 inches of snow (and we had a few flakes). Today we are in the high 80's.

The shutter speeds were quite high on most of these pictures (1/250 or faster)
Doug

[Kenda Armstrong]

http://im1.shutterfly.com/media/47a0da07b3127ccef9a16a380d3000000040O08BcNnLls0aA9 vPhA/cC/f%3D0/ps%3D50/r%3D0/rx%3D550/ry%3D400/
This picture was taken in my front yard about a week ago. I love it as a spring picture because you can practically smell the lilacs in the air and hear the butterfly wings.

[Jill Peters]

When I was in Australia I wouldn't have really associated much with spring as we don't have a great variation between seasons but I've really enjoyed spring in the UK. It's been fun watching all the leaves grow back on the trees and flowers come into bloom. I've also enjoyed driving through the countryside and seeing the newborn farm animals.

We have just come home from a long weekend in Wales where I took this picture in a small village called Gwytherin. We stayed in this village overnight and then went on a lovely walk through some farms the next morning and mostly the animals weren't interested in us, but at this one gate all the sheep and lambs came running towards us. I think they were expecting food!

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_WdzgMOprV1c/S-FcUcY7TII/AAAAAAAACdc/rUERGd2OM4w/s720/IMG_5416.JPG

[Dana Grant]

RHODODENDRONS -- State flower of West Virginia. They were gorgeous this past weekend when we went to Grandview State Park. Here are a few pics from Wednesday afternoon (it was RAINING, and I can see a raindrop on my filter in one of these!!)

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