A Day in the Swamp

Yesterday's weather prompted me to question whether today's weather would be similar. Upon finding out that we'd be having 2 days of GORGEOUS weather, I started planning an all day outing to one of my favorite local places, Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. If you haven't heard of them, here's their website, check it out: Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary

We decided our outing would get us to the swamp by 7am, opening. This would also coincide with the time just after (official) sunrise. We'd hoped for gorgeous colors and fog over the open fields. We got beautiful color, but no fog :( Oh well, maybe next time. What we DID get though (along with those colors) were tons of chances to get photographs of wildlife, especially birds. They were out like crazy, singing up a storm. It was great! Because I had such a productive day, I thought I'd share some of my better photos from the field trip :)

Plants 

Animals

 

Afterwards, we decided to travel a bit North and hit some dirt trails we'd been wanting to hit for awhile. They run alongside an FWC wildlife area and we hoped to get some more chances to see some wildlife. What we didn't anticipate was hunting season, thus the animals are skittish and tend to avoid all humans in the area. Guess we'll have to wait until hunting season, give the animals time to get back to normal. I DID manage to get an awesome landscape shot of the area though --- check it out:

 

A Good Old Nature Day

Because I'm now trying my hand at portraits, it's been awhile since I've gone somewhere nature-oriented and snapped shots. I decided that this perfect weather we're having would make for a great reason to be outdoors. I spent Saturday doing portrait shots (outdoors, of course) and I spent today in nature. I thought I might share some of the images I shot today.

One of the first shots I snagged, I think it might be the best butterfly shot I have ever managed to capture. I am quite proud of this image.

This nature-oriented location had a bit of everything - a garden, several ponds, boardwalks, swampland etc. I got a wide variety of animals, plants, etc because of this. One of my favorite places were the pond areas. I snapped these three images (in separate ponds):

As much as I love portraits, I find something quite calming about getting back to my roots (at least once in awhile), and snagging some amazing nature images.