AprilFool!

AprilFool!
Originally uploaded by Pretty Penny.

Seventy degrees and bright sunshine for three warm days in a row! March sneaked away like a little lamb. Then darkness descended upon us and dark clouds came bringing highs in the low forties, and 40 mph winds. Winter returned to our mountain world on April the First. April Fool! Then, after playing her little trick, Mother Nature relented, and the next day she smiled upon us again - leaving a little souvenir. I made this picture from our living room.
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Appalachian Spring

AppalachianSpring05s
Originally uploaded by Pretty Penny.

AS nature photographers we spend a lot of time framing up our photos. Usually that consists of composing different beauty spots that are available and grouping them together to help tell a story about how we interpret what we see. More and more though, our framing process is concerned with excluding eyesores, almost all of which are man-made intrusions into nature. I have always photographed a few of these contrasting elements of beauty and junk just for fun, but now with the fecundity of digital, that becomes very easy and I am doing a lot more of that. So here we have the old familiar (to those of us who live in the southern mountains) scene of rusted out hulks of old cars being adorned with the beauty of nature's blessings. Is this really a valid nature photograph? Actually I think it is more of a poem.