Bucks & Bears, Cade's Cove

A classic Cade's Cove image of a rusted wire fence anchoring the motor route. In this image you're looking out across the meadow toward the Smoky Mountains. All of the meadows were laden with Daisies while Black Eyed Susans were growing along the fenceline throughout the route.

It wouldn't be a perfect Cade's Cove visit without seeing White Tailed Deer everywhere you turn. Several Bucks were seen munching on meadow grasses midway through the auto tour. As I stopped to snap this photo, I wondered, "Where were the girls?" And then as I drove down around a bend, my question was answered, as I found several Does busy grazing there.

Just as I was close to the end of the auto tour that winds its way throughout Cade's Cove, this Black Bear decided to create a stir by coming out of the woods for a few minutes and getting all of the park visitors along the motor route jumping out of their cars anxious to get an image. As it turned out, I had already parked my car and had walked in the direction of an old log home near this woods so I snapped this image fairly easily.

It was good to get away for a few days and take in this beautiful park. ENJOY!

Fall & Freshen Up

I'm no expert, but recently I read keeping your blog 'fresh' is a great idea when you've had a blog for some time and especially if you get to feeling lackluster about blogging in general. So here's what I did to change things up.

I started by giving my header a makeover. I downloaded 'copyright free' textures and graphics for the background, added two of my images to the foreground of the header and saved it as a collage. Then I switched to outlined fonts and changed the font colors. I also added a seasonal description at the top. I've noticed other bloggers do this too. Keeping to one of the important rules of blogging, if you care about that stuff, I sized my header to half the size of my screen so my content is visible. I'm guessing the header is the opening act and the real drama is your posts and sidebar.

A few other things you can do to freshen up your blog: Customizing your template background width and colors, switching to new fonts and colors and changing your layout format or columns are all great things you can do. Beware, Blogger recently closed the old dashboard only to discover the new dashboard won't allow you to customize template features. So they're working to fix it. Other things you can consider might be changing the flow of your sidebar components or repositioning the sidebar images. I did this on my blog and put what I consider my number one image at the top. Categorizing your Blogrolls is another option you can try and something I've chosen to feature on my blog. Design and decor bloggers do the best job of this I've noticed. It really aids your followers when they're blog surfing from your blog.

And the single most important thing you can do. Get outside, take your camera, shoot something different, look at things in a different light. You'd be amazed what you can create from images you don't think will serve your purpose. Drop them in your software, add textures, borders, labels, make a header, whatever. After freshening up my blog I've decided it was a good thing because it actually empowered me to get back into the blogworld more than what I had been recently. Like I said, I'm no expert. These post images were taken Sunday while on a short drive through the Bluegrass area of Kentucky. I wanted a sharper image of the young buck, but he moved on too fast for me to capture it. ENJOY!