The Smithsonian Institute has odd requests sometimes. At the moment, they are requesting submissions of bug closeups... um... I don't have any bug closeups.

I went to the Botanic Garden hoping to spot a spider, or a big fly, or, well, even an aphid- but alas, there aren't any bugs zooming around in the Botanic Garden! How weird is that?

Well, I did get some pretty awesome photos of flowers, as you can see. This particular pretty one is a lily. There was an entire room of orchids as well, and it was really, really dark in there. I didn't have a diffuser on my fill flash at the moment, so, the ones I took of the orchids didn't come out to my liking.

Outside the Botanic Garden was this massive field of tulips! Ah, I love April and May. There were all sorts of them, spread out like little tufts of spun sugar everywhere- orange, pink, yellow- and those thick green leaves are great contrast!

I've got an affinity for flowers, it's true. I absolutely love flowers, and at every wedding, event dinner, or hotel I'm sitting in is likely to have at least four or five shots of something-growing-in-a-pot.

Can't help it! Nature is gorgeous!

I also tend to never manipulate these photos. WIth most photos, I tend to crop things, or perhaps change the exposure to make things more visible, but I'm not one of those people that is a PhotoShop junkie that mangles everything in sight. A couple friends of mine are trying to convince me to "shoot in the RAW" (an unprocessed photo) so that I can open it up and adjust things (make an overcast sky blue? Make a black and white photo with someone's eyes in color?) but I'm one of those old timey types that just can't wrap my brain around messing with nature.

I mean, the two photos in this post have absolutely no adjusting at all, and I'm inclined to say that Nature is pretty all by itself! :)