3 Favourites (x2)

This week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge is “picking favourites“. The challenge is to pick three of your photos that you consider to be among your very best shots, in different categories. I found this very hard!

I managed to pick 6 photos that caught my eye as I was scrolling through many hundreds of images. So I decided to go with that … just picked 3 favourites twice! 🙂

Category 1: Landscape

I don’t have a lot of landscapes, but there are a few and two of them stood out to me.

Denim Sea

Denim Sea

This was taken back in 2013 at a small town down the coast called Aberaeron. At the time I was experimenting with an HDR effect tool in PhotoShop and this was the result. I find it quite soothing with the calm colours and I like the crisp line at the division of the sky and sea.

Tree Silhouette

Tree silhouette

This one is from 2016, in early spring, while I was on a walk and spotted that there were some trees silhouetted against the bright sky across a field. It’s quite a dramatic, but simple shot.

Category 2: Plants etc.

Dandelion Droplets

Dandelion droplets

This one is from 2015 and stands out because I’ve never got a similar shot since then. It was a damp and misty day, and then the sun came out. Everything was covered in sparkly rain drops and I found this beautiful dandelion seed head, where the droplets were defying gravity and staying put on each individual seed. I love how delicate it is, and how ephemeral. As you’d imagine, I took many photos of this that day, and this is my favourite.

A whole world in a twig

A whole world in a twig

If you’ve been following my blog for a while you might remember this one from a past challenge. Last year, I had been taking photos for a photography/nature course I was doing and had brought this interesting twig indoors to take some photos in a make-shift studio. I really love how the image came out, showing the vibrant colours and variety of textures in the moss and lichen growing on it.

Category 3: Insects

Large Pine Weevil

Large Pine Weevil

Back in 2013 this was one of my first encounters with the wonderful world of weevils! To many they are a pest, but they are weird and wonderful creatures when you look at them carefully, with their amazing trunk like noses. This is one of the bigger weevils (as you can guess by it’s name) but even so, it’s still pretty small. This one was spotted outside my front door sitting on a garden chair (probably made of pine!). I love how you can see the details of the coloured hairs on its body and that the focus is good on the eyes.

Sunshine Dragon

Sunshine dragon

Finally we come to what is still my all-time favourite photo that I’ve probably shared several times before! This was taken back in 2015 at my local village pond. It was a beautiful sunny day and the grass was long. I came upon this lovely female Common Darter dragonfly resting in the grass. At the time I was most concerned with just getting a photo of her, and hadn’t realised how pretty the composition would be. I was focusing on her eyes, with a low depth of field, and the photo turned out to be a dreamy, warm, magical sort of photo. It kind of sums up how I feel about dragonflies – I find them magical, fascinating and special!