Bluebonnets Brighten Stormy Day

Pictures of bluebonnets 🙂

Bluebonnets! That’s not code for poetry, nor a poem title (yet?), nor even writing-related…

I’m traveling and stopped to photograph some bluebonnets yesterday, near New Braunfels, TX.  We parked in a grocery store lot and were able to walk along a sidewalk that ran between the stores and the highway.

Right now it seems that the bluebonnets are flowering along roadways and in some broader patches, but from what I read online it seems that they aren’t really at their peak yet. But viewing flowers along a highway can be difficult if there isn’t a safe place to stop, so we felt pretty lucky to find this patch.

I was also lucky to get these shots at all. The weather wasn’t really cooperating. It seems like a bright sunny day would really make the blues pop. But it was gray all afternoon, with ominous clouds made of dark and darker grays rolling overhead.

A few moments after I took these pictures, a thunderstorm let loose. It was quite the deluge.  Have you seen road signs that say “Road May Flood”?  This was the kind of storm for which those signs were created!

But no storm pics, only flowers.

In a couple of these you can see some of the clouds, but these photos don’t do the clouds justice.

Here the clouds look all soft, but that’s just the camera fooling you:

Besides the relatively dark day, and the fact it was close to sunset, the other problem I had was the wind. The constant and sometimes gusting wind made it difficult to get a shot of the bluebonnets that wasn’t blurry. These are the better ones:

I have lots that look like this one, not really sharp enough:

This is probably the sharpest of the broader shots:

On the positive side, since the bluebonnets grew right up to the sidewalk, I was able to get a close-up.

Enjoy!