Some awesome landscapes feature buildings, and then there’s this one. I passed the scene dozens of time driving to and from my community garden plot in 2015, but I’d already grabbed photos in winter. An outbuilding from a rotted-away farm? A small, abandoned house? A former retail store? Abandoned buildings always spark my curiosity.
The seven-photos-in-seven-days photo challenges are daunting! Picking a photo a day and posting on Facebook might not be too bad, but I’d rather post photos on my blog… and creating a daily blog post has always eluded me. So, when I gave myself three seven-photos challenges, I knew I’d be packing each of the seven photos into its own blog post. The original challenges were:
- Food photos
- Garden photos
- Nature photos
Among last year’s photos alone, I found far too many favorites to fit into these three categories. I ended up adding several more categories. I’m up to ten seven-photo challenges:
- Food
- Blossoms
- Landscapes
- Waterscapes (Landscapes that feature a water feature… yes, I made it up)
- Gardens
- Nature
- Birds
- Bugs
- Critters
- Farmscapes (Landscapes that exist only because of farms. Made this up, too.)
The Food and Blossoms photos are up. This post holds the Landscape photos.
Apparently, I tend to scout landscapes most often in autumn… at least that was the case in 2015. Though I drove to Minnesota last year, all of these scenes are from central Pennsylvania and upstate New York.
On a hillside somewhere near Lewisburg, snow, evergreen trees, and sunlight caught my attention one evening in February.
Pretty much halfway between Lewisburg and Ithaca, the town of Mansfield features a wildlife, hiking, picnicking, and boat launch area with some gorgeous vistas. Depending on the available light, I pause there during trips to and from Ithaca and try to capture interesting photos.
Returning from Ithaca on a trip last October, I zigzagged on country roads between Cayuga and Seneca lakes and stumbled across Finger Lakes National Forest. There was an interminably long dirt road with occasional parking areas at trail heads and so many gorgeous sights along the road I didn’t even stop at a walking trail. I hope to return for an extended visit; had I stayed on the forest road, I’d eventually have intersected an actual highway that would have gotten me home.
On a trip to Ithaca in November of 2015, I stopped on New York State forest lands and captured photos of several landscapes. Whoever planted this hillside had a terrific sense of the shapes, textures, and colors of trees.
Same trip to Ithaca in November of 2015, same New York State forest lands: The layers of textures, colors, and shadows in this view were sublime… and my camera managed to capture them.
Just past peak colors in October of 2015, I drove into an area of Pennsylvania that was new to me. Along a dirt road that turned out to be an Amish family’s driveway, I paralleled a very high, forested hill and stopped to capture many photos. The shading and texture resulting from trees in peak fall colors standing branch-to-branch next to fully-denuded trees created an ethereal, impressionistic effect. I captured enough photos of this hillside to wallpaper a large living room. This photo may actually be awesome enough to click to enlarge (which, by the way, works with all the photos in my blog posts).
Small Kitchen Garden – Landscapes Photo Challenge