Janet Brien's photos with the keyword: magical

(+3 insets) (view large for best impact) Again I am sitting--tucked in like a snug little bug in a rug--in my bed as I type up my post. Outside my window I'm watching the snow falling! It's not only snowing, it's sticking! There is a soft, white blanket of wet snow on the ground, though I fear that it's melting almost as fast as it's touching down. About an hour ago we lost our power! I am happily typing away on my laptop so this doesn't affect me too much. Steve has been busily setting up our portable generator and has reestablished our most important connections to power: our Monitor house heater along with lights and heating to make sure our parrot is comfortable. We will also have our computers and internet up and running too. How nice it is to have independent power when we need it! We learned the hard way how bad it can be to lose power for an extended period out in a rural area. After we moved to southern Oregon, we experienced some bad winter storms that caused a number of power outages--the worst lasting about two days. It was scary because the house got so cold and we were worried about keeping our parrot safe. After that we got a generator and it's given us peace of mind—and a nice warm parrot! :) The power is supposed to be back on within a couple of hours—let's hope so! Until then we'll be fine, thanks to Steve's diligence to keep us comfortable and happy! :) (By the way, we got power back after about three hours. Not too bad! :D) On top of the excitement of losing power, this morning began with a light haze of frost and I was very excited to get some pictures if I could. I was out for about 45 minutes and silly me—I forgot my monopod. Wow, it really does make a big difference in the number of crisp images I get. Thankfully I got nice images of most subjects I photographed so I'm not too annoyed with myself but I need to be sure to bring that with me when I go out! Today's picture is a frozen droplet I found today! One of the things I love about frozen droplets are the beautiful crinkled lines and frozen bubbles inside, so if I can capture that I feel very successful. Along with the droplet I'm including a picture of a bird in a snow pine tree I got a while back and I've also got a couple of panoramas from this morning with a very fogged-in valley and another that shows the snowy hills across our little valley. Such a lovely sight. Pam, I'm really having a lot of fun finding pictures on your stream to comment about here, and today I picked a collage of two cardinals in the snow that are so cute, so fluffy, so bright and beautiful, that I can hardly contain myself! I showed Steve and he was just as smitten. You bring us so much beauty and wonder in your photography, Pam. Thank you for the smile I have on my face right now! *BIG HUGS from southern Oregon* Explored on 2/27/19, highest placement, #3.

The first time I saw one of these flowers, I exclaimed out loud, "WHAT IS THAT?!!" Love in a Mist comes in blue, white, pink or pale purple, and a couple of years ago I planted a bunch of seeds of mixed colors with the hope that one of them would grow. To my delight, a couple of seeds sprouted and I got flowers of both blue and white! Explored on March 8, 2016. Highest placement, page 3.

Growing poppies quickly became a mad love affair to me because they give so much and require so little in return. From happy seedling to freaky looking hairy bud, and then to breathtaking blossom and finally to their alien-like seed pods, these flowers are a feast to the eyes! I discovered the Poppy Game soon after they began blooming in my garden the first year, which is where you try to catch a poppy blossom opening up before the outer casing falls away. It happens fairly rapidly so you must be outside as the sun hits the flowers or you will likely find blossoms opening with the outer husk laying on the ground below. Sometimes the flowers seem to want to pose for me, and this particular June 1 morning in 2014, I managed to find an opening poppy with its casing AND a lovely poppy bud in the background fading into soft bokeh. :)

It is always a great prize when I find a feather on my photo walks because they make such fine subjects. To the naked eye, these feathers look like nothing, but up close, the details reveal themselves and you find yourself staring at something that is almost ethereal in its beauty. I found this one on a drizzly morning at the end of September 2013. I especially like how you see the droplets of water on the underside of the feather...they look like spots!

My front garden was where I first tried to grow poppies. I had a 5-year old packet of red poppies and thought, "These will NEVER sprout, but certainly not if I don't plant them!" So I walked outside and went to my small flower bed and promptly flung them all over the bed without care! I hoped that maybe a few would sprout. I was not prepared for what happened in the coming months. Instead of just a few, I think there must have been over 100 that sprouted and grew into a veritable WALL of red poppies!! Every morning I would come out and my jaw would drop at the incredible sight before me as new poppies opened! It was incredible. I fell madly in love with these flowers and watered them every day through our hot and unforgiving summer, and all the way until the first frost of winter killed the last of them. What a show! What a gift of beauty that continued month after month. If that weren't enough, the next spring, without any input by me, these flowers had reseeded themselves and put on ANOTHER show!! I added a mixture of poppies that year and soon the red ones were joined by a rainbow of lovely blossoms of different types of poppies. Even without care, they put on another show last year. Not a speck of water from me and still, these prolific flowers greeted me with another glorious springtime show! They didn't last as long, but still, I was happy to see them blooming until June! This picture is from May 2014, the year I had my raised bed garden, and here in my front garden I had irises and hyacinths and different kinds of allium (onion ), and others too. Seeing the poppies as the sun peeked over the hillside was a sight I relished, and I would be there with my camera to see the first rays of warm light shine through the crepe-like petals of these flowers I so adore.

(For Sunday Challenge: Since it is ok to use an old picture, I thought I'd toss this one in, as I really love love love the mist coming up off the meadows and the fog in the background. The b/w adds to the magic of this picture, so it's one of my most memorable weather pictures!) A few days ago I went out to take frost images, but after I got back inside, I looked out the kitchen window and saw steam rising up off the meadow next to our property. It was so awesome looking that I turned around, put my boots back on, grabbed the camera, and took some pictures!

As usual, Steve and I stayed up way too late last night, and it was well after 1am when I stepped outside with the dogs before we all went to bed. Upon opening the door, I exclaimed, "OHHHH!!! IT'S SNOWING!!" Mesmerized by the beautiful scene, I watched the huge, fat flakes drifting slowly down from the silent sky. I noticed that the snow wasn't melting instantly when it landed on my car, and I thought to myself, "Hmmm...I wonder if I could get a picture of a snowflake!" I didn't know that a snowflake could be photographed until I saw an image posted by one of my Flickr friends, and ever since, I've been hoping for the right conditions to try for myself. But...it was so late. Yawning, I went back inside and told Steve about my idea, and he said that I should give it a try, since we both agreed that the temperature would probably be too warm in the morning to try for a snowflake picture. So, I bundled up, grabbed my tripod and a flashlight and out I went! I didn't have a clue if I would be successful so I took a dozen pictures with the hopes that maybe, just maybe, I would find a snowflake in one of them. After I felt that I might have gotten something, I went back inside and crossed my fingers as I started studying each picture on my computer. When I came to this one, I squealed out loud, "IT'S A SNOWFLAKE!!! I GOT A PICTURE OF A SNOWFLAKE!!!!!!" :D :D :D Bertrand Russell (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these in any profound sense. Wikipedia: Bertrand Russell