Appreciate Beauty of Nature with @phortun: round 180

Hey there my Hive friends and followers!

Welcome to the 180th round of my special weekly photo challenge known as Appreciate Beauty of Nature with @phortun :)

I know a lot of photo contests with nature as the main theme were/are/will be hosted by various people on the Hive blockchain but I wanted to come up with something more than just another photo contest where participants would submit their best natural photos. Therefore, I decided to go for quite an unusual concept that I am going to introduce in the following lines.

The aim of the Appreciate Beauty of Nature with @phortun photo challenge is not to make you dig up your photo archives and submit the best pictures of nature that you have ever taken. Instead, I want you guys to go out and appreciate the beauty of our nature right now.

The internet (and the Hive blockchain as well) is flooded with picture perfect shots of landscapes, mountains, forests, beaches etc. taken years ago. But this is not what I want to see in this challenge. I want to see shots that may not be necessarily stunning but they must be fresh, proving that you have just physically spent some time outdoors in the fresh air. But remember that nature comes in many forms. It doesn´t have to be a pristine jungle or a deep remote forest. An urban park, a botanical garden, a little grove on the outskirts of your town - pretty much any place with some trees, plants, rocks, bodies of water or any other natural features would be just as fine ;)

Obviously, there is no way for me to verify whether the photo that you submit in the challenge is really fresh or if it was even taken by you so I am relying on your honesty guys. The prizes for the winners (as described below) are more symbolical than overly motivating so I don´t expect too much fraudulent behavior in this challenge anyway.

I want to keep the rules of this challenge as simple and benevolent as possible so let´s agree on just this:

Only one entry (photo) per person per round.

The photo must be yours and not older than one week.

Add a few words about the photo, at least where and when you took it.

You can start submitting your entries to this round in the comment section below from now until the next round. If you want to create a separate post as your entry, you can do that but please always remember to submit your entry in the form of a comment here in this post as well. I only check the entries submitted here as comments.

Prior to publishing the next round post, I will pick 3 winners, give my full upvote on their entries and feature them in the next round of the challenge. I also give some smaller upvotes on the other entries too so that all participants get rewarded for their engagement.

I usually host the challenge on Thursday but when needed for some reason, I can host it on some other day so better check my blog regularly not to miss out on it ;)

To keep up with you guys, I submit my own fresh natural photo to every round´s post too :) Here is my contribution to start out this round:

First of all, I´m sorry for rolling out this round today on Wednesday and not on Thursday as usually but I will be traveling pretty much the whole day tomorrow. By the way, if everything goes smoothly, I will post from our secret honeymoon location on Friday so stay tuned guys ;) Now back to this challenge... You might remember the sunset Sunday photography series that I was running on my blog occasionally in the past. Normally, I would save the above featured picture for the next collection in this series but I have been too busy in the real life to keep this series alive so I decided to use this shot here instead. I took it a few days ago in the Prague neighborhood of Stodulky. Mother Nature conjured up this spectacular light show over the fields during the sunset that evening...

In the last round, we had 20 participants. After some thorough consideration, I decided to pick these 3 winners:

@nenio with this entry from Venezuela:

Currently there is rainy season in Venezuela, therefore everything is green; by the way this green tone is particular of this latitude, since the green of the vegetation that you find in higher latitudes is very different. You can see that the mountains are covered with vegetation. I consider that these colors are very soothing to the spirit. The photo was taken in Caracas, at the north-east border of the city. The mountain to the left is the Naiguatá, it is the highest this mountain range.

@friendlymoose with this entry from France:

Nice shot of that bird @phortun. It looks like he is thinking: What are you looking at? Today is our last day of our holiday in Italy and France. I took the following shot at the Cascades du Hérisson in France yesterday. We climbed 4 kilometer with an elevation of 200 meters along a couple of beautiful waterfalls like the one above.

@franzpaulie with this entry from the Philippines:

Spotted this beautiful pink dragonfly 2 days ago when I was rock climbing in Forest Camp, Valencia, Philippines. Glad it posed so calmly.

Congratulations guys! It was my pleasure to give you 100% upvotes on your entries :)

I am looking forward to what you will come up with in this round.

Have fun and appreciate the beauty of nature!

I post this series in the Amazing Nature community, a great community for all nature lovers. Feel free to check it out ;)

This post was created by me for the Hive blockchain exclusively. All rights reserved.