Appreciate Beauty of Nature with @phortun: round 60

Hi there my Hivean friends and followers!

Welcome to the 60th 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.

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You can start submitting your entries to this round in the comment section below from now until the next round.

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. As long as the response is not too overwhelming, I will also try to give some smaller upvotes on all of the other entries to reward all participants.

I might change the concept and/or the rules of the photo challenge later on, depending on how things go. 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:

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The weather has been really crazy here in Krakow, Poland lately as we have sun, rain, wind and snow changing many times throughout the day in a totally random order so being outside means you are almost guaranteed to get a fair share of water in some form. But even that didn´t prevent us from taking a decent hike in the forests surrounding the Pilsudski Hill a few days ago. That´s also where I took this picture. As you can see, I was taking the shot right against the sun but I think the dark tree silhouettes gave the picture a pretty nice and interesting atmosphere.

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In the last round, we had 7 participants. After some thorough consideration, I decided to pick these 3 winners:

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@onlavu with this entry:

Last Sunday's photo of Praděd mountain (Czechia), the highest (1491 m.a.s.l.) peak of Jeseníky, with iconic tower. The foreground is surrounded by mountain pine. Maybe it is one of the last photos with this tree there as they work hard to eliminate this introduced species in order to let the indigenous flora to prosper.

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@kohsamui99 with this entry:

Playing around in my garden in Byron Bay, Australia today trying to get some macro shots for a qurator contest after taking quite a few shots and getting use to using my new Samsung S21 Pro smartphone which has a automatic macro setting with it's advanced technology this smartphone has the ability to switch itself over to macro mode, this happens when you get within 10 centimeters of an object, the camera acknowledges and automatically switches over to its close-up mode how cool is that and this is the result of one of the macro photo i captured today the mid-air flying Bee heading into the Yellow Bell flower.

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@loulou1987 with this entry:

Ahoj, tak zase po delší době přidávám kousek přírody. Foceno včera z Vaňkáče, celé Beskydy jako na dlani. A příští týden už snad budu mít úplně opačnou fotku!

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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!

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

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

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Thank you for visiting my blog. If you like posts about Nature, Animals, Ecology, Crypto, Traveling, Photography and discovering secrets and beauties of the World, feel free to follow me as these are the topics I mostly write about. Have a wonderful day and keep on hiving! :)