You may notice that a lot of the studio Photo Blog entries involve flowers. Flowers are an easy target for photographers in Iowa as well as for all photographers in general. The wildlife here is, most times, very hard to locate and get close to and unless you really have a passionate drive to shoot animals, it's usually much more convenient to just get some shots of the local vegetation and go home. This particular image was taken in a local residential flower garden here in Grinnell.

There is a little piece of natural prairie not too far from here called Krumm Preserve where the wildflowers are just going crazy at this time of year. I don't know what all of them are called, so of course the few that I do know stand out immediately. The coneflower (echinacea) is very known for its medicinal values, most of which are attributed to the root of the plant. I, like many other people, believe that even the sight of these flowers has a significant amount of medicinal value also. Something about these tall flowers with their slender petals…