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Yesterday I went for an early morning walk in the rural areas surrounding the town where I live (Montalbán, Venezuela). The morning was warm and bright as the fog (typical these days) seemed to have decided not to visit us this day.

The road takes me south to an area known as "Agua de Obispo". It is a narrow, mostly paved road which passes through fields, farms, some forests and also flat, sparsely vegetated plains from where you can see the landscape in the distance and take good pictures of it.

Despite being an area of land used for human exploitation, nature is still present wherever you look. So, you can come across bucolic and rural scenes as well as animals such as squirrels, reptiles and birds galore. All this makes this an ideal place to breathe in the fresh air and take some lovely photos.

Old houses, leafless trees, tree bark, cows, horses... Everything in this place seems to be begging to be photographed. So every time I walk there I come home with a lot of photos and then I look at them one by one. That's something I like to do, because most of my work has to do with street photography. So when I take pictures in nature it's challenging and I always learn something new by doing this.

When I arrived yesterday from this walk with my camera memory loaded with these photographs, I downloaded them onto my PC and started selecting the ones I liked best. Then I went to #Hive to look at some interesting posts and among them I found "Appreciate Beauty of Nature" by my friend @phortun and looking at it I immediately said to myself: "Wow, I have a picture of a small bird taking flight, which I think is good enough to enter this lovely challenge"... But at that moment I didn't have time to edit the photo and send it, so I decided to do it the next day (today).

And so this is the photo (above) on that bird. It is a female yellow-bellied seedeater (Sporophila nigricollis) which flew at the same time as I took the picture. :)

As I said before, I took a lot of pictures. For this hike I specifically took a versatile AF-S DX NIKKOR 55-300mm f/4.5-5.6G ED VR zoom lens which gives me plenty of room to manoeuvre for different types of shots and is also stabilised, which is quite important in some cases such as when shooting wildlife.

Having so many photos I decided to make a complete post with them and talk a bit about the place and the experience of plunging into these roads full of nature near my town. I also decided to publish this article in this lovely Amazing Nature community because of its theme and because the launch of the challenge "Appreciate Beauty of Nature with @phortun" is done from here... As I said before, I'm almost always out on the streets taking pictures, but I also have a lot of nature to photograph nearby, so you will surely see me here again, I hope so.

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Thank you very much for your visit and appreciation!

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_{ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTE: Photographs captured with my Nikon D7000 DSLR camera in RAW format, then processed in Adobe Camera RAW for adjustments regarding light, sharpening, contrast and depth... The pictures are then exported to JPG format on which minor modifications such as straightening and adding watermarks were carried out using PhotoScape 3.6.3.}

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