Those were great!

Wonderful!

I love the 'in-place' naturalized look, like wildflowers just sprung up naturally here and there. Totally lovely.

Thanks for posting the photos. Would love to see more as the garden progresses into summer.

Thank you I live in the Hill Country because I love how it looks so what ever I do has it as it's starting point. I want to leave the flavor of the land. Mediterranean meets Arizona, ,SouthAfrica and Australia. So, I am not a purist about it being Texas natives only.

It is a garden in the wild. I have NO lawn. Caliche and limestone. I barely alter the dirt. So I plant what grows. Add a bit of compost and decomposed granite . The wildflowers did just spring up naturally. The others were planted amongst the wildflowers. My wildflower garden was arrived at by pulling out the grass and letting what came natural to come on in . Then I added a few things that are visitors from like lands. I have collected a few wildflowers here and there from around the area and Oklahoma. lately my focus has been the Arizona mountains for wildflowers and agaves that I am growing from seed this year.. I do have iris under the trees and a small greywater garden with spring obedience and texas bluebells. I also have an aloe fetish which I had to pay dearly for over this last winter. I lost many. but I swear , it is like childbirth, I have already forgotten the pain and I am off buying more.

Well, in addition to lovely plants, you do a wonderful job of capturing them.

Thank you. I do enjoy the picture thing and I like to go the extra distance. It is fun and knowing my way around Apple's iPhoto program pays out. it is an amazingly easy program to figure out. My camera does not always figure it out right and I push it till it is as it is outside. I drink my coffee and patrol with a trowel and a camera.

Mara, the iris photo is fantastic. It looks like the black iris photo in my thread, but is truer to the real color.

So you are saying that the Apple iPhoto program helps you get the color right, and with it you can make the raindrops stand out better?

I'm sure it helps to have a good camera too.

Is the program the free download, or do you buy it to get the good features?

Thanks again. Gorgeous!

I do have a decent camera and the light was overcast so the details were softly lit. The iPhoto program comes free with the Apple operating system. It acts as your library and one can edit the photos very easily. Before I had to take them to photoshop and that was a headache. They have exposure , contrast, value, saturation and two different color modulations. one can add white and black, bump the shadows and burn in highlights. They have many effects that one can use.

Most peoples photos are too light. If they have the correct esposure all the detail will come out.

I second the difficulty of getting TRUE colors on dark, vibrant colors. Tulips and irises, in particular. My best luck at being able to keep the color reasonably true and have a well balanced, sharp picture too is to take the pics early morning or late evening. Our flooding, bright sun up here really makes it hard to get anything close to true the rest of the time. Frequently its just a matter of getting a pretty shot whenever I can and hoping the light doesn't kill it too badly.

I have one camera that simply gives horrible shots of bright or deep red any time. I do a bit of rationalizing. Since I'm not shooting to help sell the flowers, I don't worry too much about the color being extemely accurate. Most folks just want to see the whole picture, and whether its enjoyable. Not whether its a King George tulip or a Queen Mary based on color.

The folks who have the equipment and tech skill to deliver the whole package all the time always get my respect.

Maybe you can correct the shots in your photo progams editing feature?

Good point. But, getting and/or keeping color close to "true" on those deep reds and deep purple/blues is always a challenge.

You need to keep posting examples of the right way to do it!

What really iratates me is the blown highlights. Photographing a good white flower next to deep foliage or limestone is hard, nigh on impossible in sunlight.. Photographing the Yucca has been a challenge.

My camera has been irritating me because its light settings are either too yellow or too blue. I need to read RTFM, a thing I hate to do. I have been using cameras since before built in light meters and these computerized jobbies have me really on my toes. (I still use my fathers old spy camera he used in WWII, (range finder Leica). I used to do the color balancing with filters and now they think for me but this new fangled camera is not thinking right and I have to jerk with the pictures to get it right.

Wow, that sounds like a neat camera.

And, you're right about the highlights. In the "out there" dept, I recently read about a digital camera in development that should finally solve that problem for us. It will take two pictures, one after the other in an instant and then combine the two exposures, one for the low light areas, the other for the high. It does sound like the best of both worlds.

Price, of course, to be announced later!

I had been wanting to see pics of your flowers. They are gorgeous, thanks for sharing.

Jana