Spring is here!

We had a mild winter this year and it seemed to hang on through the spring. We had not had an real warm temperatures till today and his afforded me a chance to get out for a walk in Nose Hill Park here in Calgary. I did set out with a purpose and that was to search for Crocuses which are usually the first wild flowers to bloom here. I had been out a couple weeks ago but it was still cold out, yet today I did not have to walk far before I found them. In fact there were so many I had to search to find the ones I thought would photograph best. I found this trinity of blooms and since it was a sunny clear day I used my body to cast a shadow on them so as to give a nice soft light. This one was my Instagram 366 image for today. I used Snapseed to crop the image and the new features in the centre focus to darken the edges. This was necessary as though I did clean some of the dead grass around them there were still blades that were very bright and needed to be toned down. The new choices in this filter work well with this. I then returned home and decided it was to nice a day to spend indoors so I went to the backyard to cleanup the leaves and grass left from last fall. While raking a particular large pile of leaves I suddenly saw a large number of Ladybugs emerge. I was trying to take some photo's with the iPhone but they were scurrying around to fast through the leaves and grass and it did not make for a pleasing image. So I continued cleaning and then went and turned on the tap so I could water the tulips that are starting to emerge through the soil. As I was doing this I felt something on my hand and looked down and saw a ladybug walking across it and then on to the nozzle of the hose. Using my other hand I took out my iPhone and worked carefully to line up the shot trying not to scare it away. However it sat patiently moving only slightly at times and I was able to capture a few frames. Once it flew away and I was done watering I went inside and brought the image in to Snapseed where I cropped it and brightened it slightly before adding the frame in RealCamera+.

These two images were also shot on Nose Hill and posted as my "tadaa Today" images. The above image I shot specifically to test the new features of the B&W filter in Snapseed. After making the initial conversion I then added a Yellow Filter and then did some exposure adjustments before finishing up with the frame. It is nice to see a company keep making improvements to it's apps and I can see that it will remain my favorite for post processing.
I also found this lone Crocus bloom and shot it the same way as I had the three above using my body to shade the flower and processing it the same way before posting to tadaa.