I am sitting in my family room on this beautiful day aching to be out in the park capturing the beauty of spring with my camera. It is hard to stay home and practice social distancing when the sun is shining and it is warm outside. So, instead of taking new spring pictures, I am revisiting ones taken in years past.

Here is one taken in 2015. It is a peony taken at the Lord Mansion near the Washington State Capitol Campus. The Lord Mansion is site of the old Washington State Museum and has beautiful gardens full of roses and peonies.

I notice that I tend to do my spring flower pictures in mostly the same locations each year. I tend to go to Mima Mounds Natural Area Preserve, Scattercreek Wildlife Area, Washington State Capitol Campus, McLane Creek Nature Trail and Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. This means that over the years I have taken many similar pictures. Each year I choose an aspect of spring photography to concentrate on. Some years it is flowers, other years it is birds or even landscapes. Mima Mounds and Scattercreek are prairie lands in southern Thurston County. Wildflowers, birds and insects are abundant. I go here when I want to concentrate on unique prairie flowers and on meadow birds. McLane Creek is riparian habitat; I find different birds and flowers there. The cherry trees are the draw to the Capitol Campus. I am still working on my “perfect” shot of the trees with the capitol in the background. I won’t get it this year. Mt. St. Helens has flowers, hummingbirds and the Milky Way.

Each spring I strive to improve my macro flower photography. This means working on focus, flower selection, positioning, lighting and trying out different equipment such as extension tubes, flash, flash modifiers and macro lenses. This year I have a new ring flash and was looking forward to trying it out. I guess I will have to do my experimenting this spring with cut flowers and action figures.

I am longing for the great outdoors, but I have found plenty to do indoors. I started off by reorganizing my file structure for storing images. I organized my images by date and was constantly frustrated by the amount of time it took me to find images. I almost remember where I took a picture; I seldom remember a date unless it is of great significance. I always remember that I went to Antarctica in February 2000. So I decided to organize my images by location and then by year. It’s taken awhile, but I am almost finished reorganizing. The jury is still out.

I also have been busy re-editing photos that I previously edited in Lightroom/Photoshop, in On1. I am enjoying refining my skills. One thing that I do find easier to do in On1 than in LR is masking. The refine tool does a great job separating trees from sky. Below is a sunset taken at Rowena Crest near Moise, Oregon that I redid using On1. Comments?