It's A Beautiful State I Live In

You Know What's Hard To Take Pictures Of?

Ice. We went to the Ice Festival this past weekend. My challenge to myself for the day was to keep my camera in full manual mode. I have been playing around with my camera in manual mode lately and I really like having complete control of the camera. However, it means that I don't always get things like exposure and shutter speed right. Especially on ice. Here are some of the pictures I took:

I don't know if there was an official theme, but there were a lot of ocean related sculptures so I'm guessing there was an ocean theme?

How I feel most days!

My husband calls this one the "Heil Hitler" picture. Leave it to him to ruin my picture!! =)

A couple abstract ones:

Mountains

Although I'm a Texas girl at heart, I have to admit the Rockies offer some spectacular scenery. Infact, if we were to move away I think I would really miss seeing the mountains. Here are two pictures I took on our trip to Crested Butte. You just can't beat snow capped mountains and a nice blue sky.

Balloon Festival

We go to this every year. I was a little worried this weekend when the balloons didn't launch on Saturday and the Balloon Glo got cancelled. But, this morning was perfect weather!! Here are some of the pics I took:

Fireworks

The 4th of July celebration is starting early here! I went out and took some pictures of the fireworks today. There will also be fireworks tomorrow and the next day. I'll probably go out then and mess around with different shutter speeds and things like that. Here are some of the ones I took today. They don't look as spectacular scaled down for the blog, but you still get the idea.

Sand Dunes

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

Here are some of the shots I got at Black Canyon National Park. The views were breath taking, although standing on some of the overlooks made me dizzy. It probably doesn't come close to the Grand Canyon, but these were some of the biggest canyons I have ever seen.

There was a really cool upturned tree that looked just like a deer (you can see it, right?).