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I had the pleasure of a few days in the mountains recently and – lucky me – the weather cooperated very nicely with my efforts to capture the grand landscape.

It was a beautiful, sunny day, except for a short while when dark clouds banded together and it looked like a storm was brewing. However, a few minutes later, the clouds passed and the day continued to be sunny.

Mountain landscape covered with snow under stormy clouds.

Mountain Snowscape under a Stormy Sky.

The windflowers in the last post are wilting away, unfortunately before I had a chance to re-visit them. Instead, the bleeding heart flowers are in full bloom – such is the cycle of life.

The bleeding heart, also known as Venus’s car, Dutchman’s trousers, lyre flower or by their latin name lamprocapnos spectabilis is originally from Korea and north and western China, but it seems to do very well in almost any temperate climate, so it is a very popular garden plant.

We simply let it grow and cut the wilted stalks short in the fall and they come back year after year.

Bleeding Heart Flowers in a Row

Bleeding Heart Flowers

In order to take the photo, I mounted the camera on a tripod and used an insane amount of extension (over 50 mm for a 70-200 mm lens). Despite an aperture of f/16, the depth of field is extremely shallow, about 2-3 mm in my estimate. That, combined with the light wind that moves the flowers like swings on a playground, made it challenging to get sharp images.

What really amazes me is how the lower white parts of the blossoms are textured. I had never noticed this with the real flowers before taking these pictures. Which just goes to show how photography can expand your awareness of the world. 🙂

The weather has finally turned sunny and warm, spring is definitely here. In fact, it’s almost warm enough to be early summer.

These beautiful white flowers grow in my garden under a rose bush. They are windflowers, also known as wood anemone, windflower, (European) thimbleweed, smell fox, or by their latin name anemone nemorosa.

White Windflowers

White Windflowers

The flower is quite small (about 2 cm across), so I had to get very close using an extension ring between the lens and the camera. A tripod was required, of course. 😉

It is currently rather cold and it snows quite a bit in Bavaria. On Sunday the sky was a clear blue and the sunlight was crisp and clean, lighting these ice crystals beautifully:

Ice Crystal Colors I

Ice Crystal Colors I

Can you guess what the background is?

Winter has arrived here in Germany and it is getting cold and snowy. On an outing I found a frozen pond with crisp, fresh snow on the frozen surface which an animal, probably a dog, had explored.

Animal tracks in fresh snow.

Tracks in the Snow

I like the way the sunlight plays on the white surface with the shadows appearing blue, not black, because of the ice.

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