Appreciate Beauty of Nature with @phortun: round 149

Hi there my Hivean friends and followers!

Welcome to the 149th 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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As you might have noticed, I had to skip this challenge last week as I was in Zanzibar and the internet connection was very bad in our area. It never happened to me before and it felt really weird not to be able to roll out the new round. Sorry about that guys. So with one week delay, I´m finally coming with the 149th round today. We are already back to Prague now but our hearts and minds are still on this amazing Tanzanian island. Zanzibar is also home to one national park. It´s called Jozani and even though it´s a pretty small park, it has a lot of natural beauties to offer. You can definitely expect a full post about this national park to show up here on my blog soon as I took a lot of photos there (some even featuring the famous Red Colobus Monkeys) but for now, let me just share this random shot of the lush tropical greenery of the park. I took this picture last Friday.

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In the last round, we had only 3 participants so picking the winners was easy:

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@onlavu with this entry from the Czech Republic:

This one was shot not more than 6 hours ago. Few minutes after the sunset in my beloved Jeseniky Mountains (Czechia). Today I got lucky, in terms of weather.

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@friendlymoose with this entry from the Netherlands:

A photo from the rainy Netherlands! Taken yesterday.

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@jlinaresp with this entry from Venezuela:

Hello friends! I wanted to call this photo "Silence"... Because my feeling when I took it, was precisely that "to be immersed in absolute silence"... I took this photo during the morning of December 15, 2022 (Yesterday for me, according to my local time zone)... It was at 7:55 AM from a rural road that crosses the rural area of "Agua de Obispo", in the municipality of Montalbán (Carabobo State, Venezuela). .. I took it during my morning walk and it's a quite simple landscape... "Minimalist" I would say... It is a dry tree, almost without branches, wrapped in fog, in the middle of a plain with grass... It was made with my old Nikon D7000 camera and aTokina ATX-PRO 100mm f/2.8d lens. I'm delighted to share here with all you again!... Special greetings and thanks to @phortun friend for his excellent idea!

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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, Sport, 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, guys! :)