April 22 is Earth Day, and I really had no plans to go out and take pictures on this day, but as I upload some pictures on my Flickr, I saw a link to a website asking people to go out and shoot pictures on Earth Day, and submit to them "your best photo" as they are going to do a mosaic. I thought, "Why not?" However, my plans of going out and do a photo walk around the subdivision where I live didn't push through because of one reason: the rain.
It has been raining for how many days and it wasn't just normal rain.. it's a heavy downpour at that. At first, I consider the rain "a breathe of fresh air" as it has been so hot, but afternoon rains for four or so days is more of like a curse rather than a blessing.
At 11AM, I noticed that it was getting dark again. I left the PC for a while and took my camera to capture the dark sky, and the birds had been frantic trying to find shelter before the rain fall, but it seemed this bird was just keeping his cool as he sits comfortably in the electric wires. A little lesson learned from the bird there. =)
It rained hard practically the whole afternoon. I kept on praying for the rain to stop so I could go out and take pictures, and at around 4:30PM, it stopped - well, not really as there were raindrops here and there, but I still grabbed the time to check out what I can take pictures of.
Can you see a trend? Because of the rain, everything I see have water drops! Like what I said, I planned to do a photo walk around the subdivision, but seeing all flowers have water drops, I decided to stay and just take pictures of the flowers from our close neighbors' gardens. The first picture was from a house fronting ours, and the hibiscus was from a house next to the house where I took the first picture. The one in the middle was from our garden.
One of my cats was playing hide and seek with me, and I wanted to take a picture of him (Kitty Pogi) by the garden, but my cat has ADHD, because whenever I get quite near him, he'd run off and when I leave, he'd try to come near me. Ugh! Anyway, in my attempts to get a picture of him, I saw this fly and took a picture.
My other cat, Kitty Lilith has been one of my favorite cats to take pictures of. Sadly, she's not really fond of the camera. Often times, I had to hold her if I wanted to take a picture of her face. While I was playing hide and seek with Kitty Pogi, she went out and watched us. I didn't want her to run off, so I just zoomed the camera on her. Cats are part of nature and of earth, too, right? I wanted to put her picture here because my baby's no longer a baby... she's pregnant now.
It was a dark afternoon, and my time to take pictures went by so fast, so just after an hour of taking pictures, I had to stop as I don't want to use my flash in capturing pictures. I started my Earth Day with a picture of a bird, and I will end it with a bird picture. =) The cloud was dark, it was a different setting than I had with the first picture, so in order for the bird to be seen, I changed the white balance of the camera into tungsten. Zooming 4 times (optical) and 16 times (digital) to get this shot, it was a bit difficult as slight movement will result in a blur, but I think I did well here. This bird had an insect in his mouth, and as I watched him, I realized he was courting another bird - in a picture I took, he was giving the insect to the other bird. Oh sweet!
How did you spend Earth Day?
*** Jenn ***
