Sunday Stills TNC: Wildflowers and Flowers

April showers bring.....

the Easter Bunny?

OK, so this week's challenge is flowers - but the Easter Bunny does have flowers on his vest! Since it is Easter, I decided to pull this picture out of the archives... the long-ago archives.... like 20 years ago! My best friends (my very talented, artistic best friends) made this costume to entertain the children in our fairly small town. Mr. EB would don the costume for Breakfast with the Easter Bunny, for Easter bunny parades and for Easter egg hunts. the usual stuff.  He visited schools. He was a glutton for punishment. Kids would pull his tail, step on his toes and punch him. The temperature inside the suit and mask was always 10 - 20 degrees warmer than the ambient temperature and temps in coastal SC could be rather warm in the spring.  Even Mr. EB's children didn't know their dad was in the suit. It was a deep secret! This Easter bunny has long been retired, but it was fun to find the picture and have an entire bouquet of memories spring forth!

But, kids, especially 5 year-old kids, think they know everything. Mr. EB's son thought he knew that dad was in the suit, so I took a turn at being the Easter bunny and visited the classrooms, while dad just happened to drop by! In case you have ever wondered what 'Dreaming' looks like... here she is!

Oh, flowers. That's right. This challenge is about flowers. Where we currently live.... we have none.

Zip!

Zero!

Zilch!

Not even a dandelion yet. So... back to the archives and the EB theme, but this time with flowers!  Since I didn't take any new pictures, I scanned some old ones and then tried to make it a 'photo' learning opportunity by enhancing some of the pictures with Adobe Photoshop.

Here is one of my guys with Mr. EB in front of a beautiful bank of Azaleas. We lived in coastal Carolina in this picture. You won't find this where I live now!

Photo was brightened and annoying spots on the picture were removed with the cloning tool.

Here's another shot of son #1 searching for eggs among the Camellias. 

Shadows were lightened

Here's a close up of the flowers. It doesn't do them justice. 

But this particular tree had beautifully marbled blooms.

I cropped the picture where my son just found the egg. The edges were blurred and the light areas where daylight showed through the leaves was smudged . I couldn't get much improvement on the sharpness since it was a scan of a photo, perhaps if I had a better scanner.....

And since we don't want son #2 to laugh at his brother's 'ancient' pictures being published and not receive the same treatment.... Here is #2, on another year, with Mr. EB and again, you can see the beautiful Azalea's in the background.

I brightened this one and had great fun removing a person walking behind the EB using the cloning tool.

(Ah, wouldn't it be sweet to so easily remove our annoyances?!)

Happy Easter to everyone! Enjoy your spring flowers! I'm sure I hope we'll get to see them soon enough!

Visit more Sunday Stills challenges to see some beautiful flowers.