To me, this picture just screams of Summer. The bright lighting, the busy bee, the bull thistle in bloom. It’s one of my favorites. And… wait for it…. bull thistles are WEEDS!

See – I told you it was a theme!

I was down in Portland over the weekend, for a quick visit with my mother. While I was there, we took our cameras and went to a small park near her house that is part flying disc golf and part woods walking trail. I love to take pictures of flowers and insects but this trip definitely taught me that I need to learn more about manual camera operation so I can better adjust the white balance and I need to buy a true macro lens for the flowers and bugs.

But here are a few fun photos:

There’s a challenge called the 365 Project where the goal is to take a picture a day to both learn more about photography and to document a year in your life. I’ve been considering doing this for a while because I’m really trying to learn more about the camera I have.

So, I’ve decided to take the challenge starting January 1st. To help facilitate that as well as to have a home for all the photos so this blog doesn’t get too unfocused, I started a new website to house my photographic journey.

The blog is up, though I’m still messing around with parts of it. You can see it here.

It’s snowing again today and I wandered around with my camera for a bit. I really liked this picture of the duck pond down the road from me. You can click on the picture to see a larger version.

Sometime this week I should begin a new adventure. During the holidays I had been playing with my sister-in-law’s dSLR camera and liked what could be achieved over what my little Point-N-Shoot could do. My mother has been a photographer for many years – film to now using digital – but I never thought it was for me because I was seriously non-visual.

I’m not blind, unlike a couple of friends of mine. Nor do I have actual vision issues but rather I have a weirdly wired brain.

Read the rest of this entry »