Boxing Day Off

Today was a regularly scheduled work day, but the park was covered and I didn't expect any crowds now that the spring is closed.  I decided to take the day off and continue my holiday weekend a little further.  I spent the day at home, enjoying Christmas gifts.  I did take a stroll through the yard with my camera though.  I found some beautiful things, but I really had to look.  In the past ten days or so, we have had temperatures above 80 and below 30.  The grass has stopped growing, brown leaves cover the ground.  Its very dead outside.  To find flowers still blooming and mushrooms still sprouting is a true example of survival of the fittest.  Some of the flowers can survive the difficult variation in temperature extremes and continue to flourish.  They will continue to create other hardy plants that will endure temperature fluctuation.  Nature is good at adapting to change.







As I walked, I was drawn to places where there was bright color in contrast with the dead, brown leaves.  I have a function on my camera that lets you select a color and transform everything else to black and white.  I played around with this feature a little to highlight some of the colors that I found.  The first two are kind of a before and after with a normal photo and a highlighted photo.  The last one, I really only liked when it was highlighted.  The little flowers got lost in the original image.