Use Backyard Flowers for the Great Colors

Beauty truly is Everywhere in this World of ours, and the Ameteur Photographer is just as capable as a professional photographer, with today's modern high resolution cameras, to capture such natural wonders, as you see here.

The examples I have included in this article are but a small sampling of the pictures I have taken in my own backyard, over the past few years.

I do have a very nice NIKON D3100 camera with several lens' but I also have a small NIKON handheld S8000 camera, that is such a good and easy to use unit, that I carry it almost anywhere with me.

These photographs were taken mostly with the small handheld and just a few were taken with the higher end Nikon D3100.

You really just need a NICE camera with decent resolution and not necessarily a PROFESSIONAL camera to take great shots of the Nature around you.

So, you should never be intimidated by those people walking around with their setups that cost thousands of dollars.

Sure, your shot might not be able to be blown to get a big professional print, say 24x36 inches, but you can get a nice 5x7, 8x10, and often, depending on your camera's resolution even larger prints that have fantastic resolution.

My wife and I lived in the Myrtle Beach area of South Carolina, and we have done most of the landscape work ourselves, and we tried to have year-round flowers blooming as much as possible.

This is a slow process for the amateur gardener, but we keep things interesting with the constant changes.

We really enjoy them when they bloom, and we can just sit on our back patio, or walk around the yard and be surprised by the varieties of color that confronts us at times.

Now, don't get me wrong, we're not one of those couples who have planted row upon row of carefully planned layers of greenery that will take turns blooming throughout the year.

No, we have picked plants that we, personally, like, and we placed them, almost randomly in spots so that we, ourselves, can enjoy them, and not some garden club.

Helen and I love wildflowers.

You can purchase your exotic plants if you want.

But, Helen and I really do get more enjoyment out of a couple of three-dollar bags of Wildflower seeds, than almost any of our other flowers in our yard.

We keep a ten-foot by six food oval of planter space, in our side yard clear every year for Wildflowers.

We just rake it, broadcast a mixture of wildflower seeds over the dirt, and then rake the seeds into the dirt.

Everyone gets to enjoy them as they bloom one type and color after another.

An added treat for us, is the number of Bees, Butterflies, and other insects that are attracted by the flowers all during the blooming season.

They are great to watch as they attack the different blooms for their nectar. And they, in turn, draw all types of birds, which are also great to enjoy as they fly around in our bushes..

This Ivy plant was originally in this pot, and on a table in our Sunroom.

I neglected it I guess, and it died. Or at least I thought so.

I took the Pot, full of dirt, and with just ,some dried up brown twigs outside and placed it on a root of a tree to dispose of later.

And I promptly forgot about it, with the intention of salvaging and reusing the Pot as another time.

Helen pointed it out to me the next year, and the Ivy had obviously recovered well!

What great Colors and Shadows there are on this Tropical plant, the Bromiliad Fasciata.

We keep it in the Sunroom in the winter season just in case of a cold spell.

We have found that even though South Carolina is designated as being in the tropical zone of the US, there are many tropical plants that cannot survive the cold snaps that occur relatively often in the Myrtle Beach area.

I caught this great shot in the late evening light.

I love Palm Trees. and we have several in our yard that love the local South Carolina climate.

What I really enjoy, along with the overall beauty of the total tree, is to walk up, when the light is right and taking a close look at the Coloring and Texture of the structure of a Palm tree, itself.

I have used this photograph to generate a number of different thumbnail pictures for use in my Articles, Short Stories and other writings on my HubPage site.

Sometimes, a picture containing contrasting plants or flowers can turn into a great picture, like this one.

I took this picture in December, next to my house. It was a relatively cold day, and the wind was blowing pretty steady.

I walked around the house, and caught this picture with the fading Maple leaves competing with the Pampas Grass in the wind. Great Colors, that I hope you can enjoy.

It really looks great when enlarged 24x36.

Sometimes, you just have to look up

You can be surprised by what you might see. Especially in the Autumn, when the leaves are going through their seasonal change in color.

I was walking into the woods, and caught this shot with the evening light shining through the trees and their leaves.

Actually, this is not my Magnolia Tree, but my next door neighbors.

The shot was so tempting, I just had to sneak across their yard and capture this picture, before the bud opened fully.

Magnolias love the Southern climate and you will find them everywhere.