I apologize in advance to all my colder climate readers for saying this (hi Sis), but our weather has been chilly lately. We’ve had several nights in the last couple of months with hard freezes and many more with temperatures down in the 30s. The Florida panhandle even had snow a few days ago!  So it’s surprising to see our trees starting to bud and blossom already. We don’t get a lot of color in our fall foliage but beginning around this time of year, it seems nature tries to make up for it. This can lead to some nice photo-ops if you keep your eyes open.

Lynn and I went out for a Valentine’s Day breakfast this morning and on the way back, she drove me around for a few minutes looking for good examples to photograph with my Canon S90. By the way, I very much like the S90.  It has a great deal of capability in a very small package.

Here’s one tree that caught my eye (click these to go to Flickr where you can see larger versions).

Red maple tree and reflection

The color isn’t from leaves, but from red seed pods. Here’s what they look like up close.

Red Maple seed pod close up

We have other trees starting to bloom too.  Here’s a white one, with some more of the red maple trees in the background.

White blooms, blue sky

So – keep a camera with you and keep your eyes open.  You might find something interesting to capture.  Also – if you can help with identifying these specific trees, please comment on the post or send me an email. Thank you, Kevin McKinney for helping me identify the Red Maple trees.

©2010, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved.