Summer Landscape

Summer has officially arrived and with the turning of the season, the summer wild flowers are starting out.

One of the newer restoration areas in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park is a wetland area.   The national park has reclaimed this area over the last 4 or so years and the huge amounts of wild flowers in bloom speaks volumes.

The above image was captured on a foggy morning last week.   The huge landscape of daisy and balck eyed susan images is really impressive.

Some of you may recall tat last summer I concentrated on this area.   The number of insects and plants is really impressive.  This is also a great area for photographing white tailed deer among the wild flowers.

As I venture out to the area more often now that we are in summer mode, I'll keep you posted on my photographic findings.

Summer Wings

As summer comes upon us, the number of flying insects increases dramatically.    I'm fascinated with these winged insects.   When I can find them in nice photographic circumstances, I enjoy capturing them in all of there beauty.  

The first image is a crane fly.   There are numerous species of crane flys and I'm not certain of the exact species, but all crane flys have a lot of beauty in there wings and bodies.

Next up is my favorite dragon fly - the calico pennant.  Both the males and females have such beautiful patterns and the mature male (pictured above) has the most beautiful gold and crimson coloring. 

The close cousin of the dragon fly is the damsel fly.   I'm really poor at identifying individual species in damsel flys.  They have so many closely related identification markings that I give up and start lumping all of them together as just damsel flys.  

Last image is a newly emerged prince baskettail dragon fly.   As they mature, they have some really beautiful colors.  Hopefully I'll get to share one of those with you later this summer.