2014 in Photos

The year of 2014 is over; the year of 2015 has begun. Over the past year, I took a lot of pictures - more than 1200 photos of clouds, bugs, plants, rocks, and more. I deleted most of the low-quality and repetitive photos. Then, I selected 20 of the remaining photos which I thought were the most interesting or significant.

In this post, I'll include those photos, in chronological order.

Spring

1. Cold Hummingbird

I took this photo after a late snowstorm in Spring. In the days leading up to the storm, it was warm and sunny and the fields were green, so the snow came rather unexpectedly. During the storm, one of the hummingbirds at our feeder was covered in ice and could barely fly. This hummingbird was more fortunate, but unlucky nevertheless.

2. Green Landscape

I took this photo on the side of a biking trail. I didn't edit or crop the photo - this is how it looked.

3. Indian Paintbrush

The Indian Paintbrush is an unusual flower. What appear to be flower petals are actually bright red leaves; the Native Americans crushed the bright red leaves and used them for medicinal purposes. The flowers themselves are little greenish points sticking out from the leaves; if you pull the flowers out from the leaves, there's a drop of sweet nectar on the end. I like the flowers for that reason.

4. Milkvetch Flower

This flower is a type of Milkvetch, most likely a Field Milkvetch.

5. Cumulus with Pileus

This is a cumulus cloud punching through a thin pileus cloud. For my post about cumulus clouds, click here; for my post about pileus clouds, click here.

6. Mountain Top

This is a mountain top near the Arapahoe Basin ski resort. I thought it looked kind of cool, with the green trees and white snow, so I took a photo.

7. Ridge

This is a ridge between Grizzly Peak and Lenawee Mountain in the Rocky Mountains. Grizzly Peak is partly visible at the left edge of the photo; it is higher than the ridge, but appears lower because it is farther away.

8. Mammatus Clouds

Mammatus clouds often form during the dissipation of a thunderstorm. They look sort of like upside-down cumulus clouds.

Summer

9. Cumulonimbus

Cumulonimbus clouds are big and powerful. They form when cumulus clouds get too big to be cumulus clouds any more; their tops spread out, and they form ice crystals. They often produce lightning and rain (and sometimes hail).

10. Sunset Storm

On the right is a thunderstorm. I wanted to take photos of lightning, but the lightning wasn't frequent enough to get any good shots. So instead of getting lightning, I got the sunset.

11. Grasshopper

This is a close-up of a grasshopper on a stalk of grass. I hadn't yet discovered the trick for taking ultra-macro photos, but the photo still looks cool, I think.

12. Beetle

This is a close-up of some type of beetle. I wasn't able to determine what type of beetle it is; if anybody knows, please comment!

13. Aerial View of West Seattle

I took this photo of West Seattle from an airplane. The industrial district is in the foreground, and West Seattle Bridge leading into West Seattle is visible on the right side of the image. The island in the background is Blake Island.

14. Mount Adams

This is a set of photos I took of Mount Adams in Washington. Because it was taken from an airplane moving at about 600 MPH, the two photos are at slightly different angles, and form a stereogram. I set up this stereogram for cross-eyed viewing. It's awesome how many details pop out when viewing something in 3D!

15. Colorado Flooding Damage

This is a view of some impressive damage in the mountains from the 2013 Colorado floods. Water from the massive amounts of rain during the flooding was absorbed by the soil, triggering mudslides in many places in the mountains. The mudslide at this location wiped out a whole section of forest; the location of the photo was originally a nice hiking trail through a pine forest, and is now a barren pile of rocks and dirt.

16. Rolling Clouds

This is a stratocumulus cloud rolling over a mountaintop. I took this photo from the top of a nearby mountain.

Autumn

17. Garden Spider

This spider built its web between two bushes on opposite sides of a pathway. Before I noticed the spider, I walked through (and destroyed) the lower third of its web. The spider was about the size of a quarter.

18. Cloudscape

I've noticed that photos often do a poor job of representing the subject. Cameras usually change the colors or the perspective just enough to make the photo look like something totally different, so that what was originally a beautiful sunset becomes a boring orangish sky. This photo, however, came very close to representing the scene as it appeared at the moment

19. Deer

Yep, deer. The one on the right is a buck, the one on the left is a doe. A doe is a female deer, in case you haven't watched The Sound of Music.

Winter

20. Christmas Light

Finally, a close-up photo of a mini christmas light. The bulb shown in the photo is about 5/8" long, so this is about 10x magnification. To read my post about the technique I used, click here.

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