I wandered around at Balcones Canyonlands NWR with my manual macro lens. It is a rather heavy lens, but it has a very wide aperture, 150mm focal length, and it is a macro so it has a short focus distance for close ups. I was planning on their being a lot of wildflowers along the main hiking trail and I was planning on their being very cooperative butterflies there as well. The wildflowers were there anyway and there was plenty of late afternoon sun so I work around the wildflowers which I think are called gayfeather.
My main challenge with these photos was the background. I was trying in the above photo to put some of the same shapes blurred into the background. The close up is just blurred green and you can see how narrow the focus depth is.
I then hiked around and took a photo from the top of the ridge that I think turned out well. With the long focal length, the distant objects are kind of compressed together and the hiking trail and parking lot are in the same photo. It is actually quite farther to the parking lot than it looks. You can see that there is only one car in the parking lot and thankfully it is mine.
I took the flower photos along the trail near the bottom of the photo. The sunlight and shadows at this time really give this photo some depth, I think, and there is also a bit of late afternoon haze that adds to the feel of the photo. Thanks for reading.
Jason Frels 
Beautiful. That macro lens does a good job, I think.
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The focusing can be difficult when hand holding.
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Wow! All great shots. Keep using that lens. 🙂 The close up shot of the gayleather, makes me feel like I could just reach out and touch it!
Nice, that you didn’t have any trouble finding your car in the parking lot. Not like parking at a Walmart! And I can’t tell the color of your car from the pic, but is it a shiny blue? Yes, we are still looking for a car.
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Thanks. It is a fun lens to use, but it is kind of a special purpose lens.
My car is kind of dark blue. When I picked out the car I called my two daughters and told them they get to pick out the color (this was in 2014). I think it worked out well.
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Well I am glad you chose to use the lens this time.
How nice of you to let your daughters choose the color. I would say they did a good job! Its not gray!! Dark blue would be okay with me, though I do prefer the light colors, but it would be better than gray! 🙂
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I didn’t want gray either.
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I don’t want black,or brown either or green but other than that I am easy to please. Oh, not white either for that shows up marks too easily.
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You don’t care what color it is as long as it’s blue. Got it.
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Exactly!
And make it shiny blue! 🙂
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what. a. view!
the last photo is genuinely breathtaking…
love always,
[gotw}
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Thanks for the nice comments.
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Lovely shots. How often do you visit Balcones NWR?
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A few times a month. It is a nice place for a hike.
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I’m sorry I missed it.
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Early in the pandemic I visited Doeskin Ranch and was disconcerted by how many cars I found in the parking lot—more than any of the non-pandemic times I’d been there. It’s good to see things back to normal there, unless you went early in the morning and plenty of other people arrived later.
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I usually go an hour and half or so before sunset. There are usually 1 or 2 other cars there. I think during the most severe part of the lock-down, people were desperate for somewhere to go and this place got kind of crowded, but that seems to have tapered off a bit.
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