Cee is featuring songs as inspiration for photography for her Fun Foto Challenge. And this week it’s one of my most favorite songs, Here Comes the Sun!
It’s been a long cold lonely winter
Here comes the sun
That ice is slowly melting
The smiles returning to the faces
I took this photo about 3:45 pm today – I liked the way the backlit sunshine brought out the details of the flower! This is for Nancy Merrill’s A Photo a Week challenge with the topic of “natural lighting” and Cee’s Flower of the Day 8/15/21.
For Jude’s Travel Words, Life in Colour, this month’s word is the color purple.
Purple hyacinths
A more vibrant shade of purple are these rhododendrons.
Purple displays at Lightscape, a holiday event at Chicago Botanic Gardens
Marine life (corals) at Brookfield Zoo
Faux flowers
Purple in sunrises and sunsets (sunrise in Tanzania, sunsets on Chicago expressway and the Caribbean Sea)
Purple signs (Quebec City & Rio de Janeiro)
For the last day of Becky’s April Bright Squares, this is a (double) rainbow, a perfect and complete arc that we were treated to yesterday evening at 7:00 after a brief storm blew through our area. Afterward, just about all my friends that live around here posted their rainbow photos on Facebook! I mean, WOW! This was a spectacular sight! A fitting end to a very BRIGHT month! Thank you, Becky!
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge this week is Textures. These photos were all taken in the past three months – winter months.
Textures on screens in winter
Textures on water and ice
Textures of tree bark
Three different textures in a still life on my mantel
Texture of my favorite sweater
Becky posted a gorgeous sunrise for her Bright Square today, but I’m rarely up early enough for that! Even so, I have these beauties in my archives – a sunrise in Tanzania and a sunset in the Baltic Sea. In my (limited) experience, sunrises tend to be more subtle than sunsets, but beautiful nonetheless.
There is a saying that all clouds have a silver lining. In the case of this image, the clouds have a tinge of golden lining, lit by a September late afternoon sun. This bright scene is my contribution today for Becky’s April Square: Bright.
This is my first time participating in Hammad Rais’s Weekend Sky challenge!
It’s been a bit difficult to capture the sunset where we live – our house faces north and a row of houses blocks the western sky. But before Daylight Savings started, I would take walks in the late afternoon and sometimes be lucky to capture a beautiful sunset. These were taken on March 5, when the ponds were still partially frozen and remnants of February snows still remained.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge this week is Sunset to Sunrise; essentially, night photography with the added beauty of the sun going down or coming up!
Sunset
Night
Sunrise
Enjoy this video!
Marilyn Armstrong of Serendipity Seeking Intelligent Life on Earth has taken over a monthly challenge called The Changing Seasons.
The Changing Seasons is a monthly challenge where bloggers around the world share what’s been happening in their month. To join in, you can either:
 1. post 5-20 photos in a gallery that you feel represent your month. Don’t use photos from your archive. Only new shots.Â
or
2.  post a photo, recipe, painting, drawing, video, whatever that you feel says something about your month. Don’t use archive stuff. Only new material!
In either case, tag your posts with #MonthlyPhotoChallenge and #TheChangingSeasons so others can find them. One thing that won’t change though. Include a ping-back to Marilyn’s post, and she will update it with links to everyone else’s.
Marilyn says, “For those of us who have participating in this challenge for years … since the first years when Baron Guzman ran the challenge, I think we have our own style on how to make this work. I could never use a single picture. I’m too indecisive. Especially given the rapidly changing climate we are experiencing, I think this is an important challenge.” Ditto for me about indecisiveness! So here’s my September photo gallery: Visits to kitschy or pretty places in our area (because we can’t travel), flowers, and season changes were the things that characterized September 2020.
Recycling styrofoam at Dart Co. in Aurora; sculpture called “Solitude”; Mr. Eggwards (Humpty Dumpty doppelganger); sunflowers at Cantigny estate in Wheaton; Tribune magnate McCormick’s house at Cantigny; outdoor BBQ stove at my niece’s house in Evanston; 4 silos surrounding Inverness Town Hall; Black Lives Matter billboard (a little bit of sanity in an area full of Trump signs on lawns); all that’s left of a factory in Grayslake, now in the middle of a park; kitschy Egyptian copies of statues & pyramid in Wadsworth, officially known as “Gold Pyramid House” (the pyramid isn’t gold right now because they had a fire); hibiscus flower after rain; rare red flower called “cardinal flower” (it disappeared within a day or two); zinnias in my garden; mini petunias in my garden; tree branches on the campus of our community; katydid (I feel an affinity – we share a name!); sunset in a nearby suburb; another sunset in a nearby suburb; West Lake (pond on the campus here) with its many ducks – most of them young adults (a few months ago most of them were ducklings).
Wanderlust & Wonderment 