Fog

I love foggy mornings. It's quieter, for one thing. Does mist act like a sound buffer? And I love how you can just see the silhouettes of things in the distance.

Moon is up

I love this time of year and this time of morning. The sun is just hitting the tops of the trees and the moon is still out. Just me and the dog and the birds and other, hidden critters. It's lovely and crisp and quiet.

Lost in the pickers

At least, that's what I call them. Here they're known as sand spurs. The little burrs on the end of the stalks fly off at the slightest disturbance and poke you, and then when you pull them out, the little barbs on the end don't want to let go.

Today we took a side track and ran smack into a patch of the damn things. Daisy got them in all four paws so I ended up carrying her out of there. I hate them, I do.

Dog fennel

Dog fennel smells so sweet out in the preserve. I could stand in the middle of it forever and not get tired of it. Such a silly name. The plants grow in great big clumps, like green and white fox tails. Steve says it smells like dill when he crushes it in his fingers. I think it smells like green.

Patience is rewarding

Daisy is watching a man with a beautiful border collie walk down the trail. I made her sit while they went by and she was doing fine until the man's dog made a move in her direction, and then she leaped towards them. After making her sit again, I decided to wait for a while before continuing.

I am trying to teach Daisy to be calm around other dogs and people. This requires a lot of patience on my part and I don't have any, so it's something I'm learning as we go.

It helps to have a camera when you're learning patience. While waiting for my dog to become resigned to the fact that we weren't going anywhere and the man with the collie wasn't coming back, I began taking pictures of what was around us.

I like this one because there are layers of color—green, lavender, brown and gold as well as layers of depth—undergrowth, tree trunks, mist and sky.

Here are a couple more, same spot, one left and one right.

What you see isn't always what you get

This happens to me a lot: I'm taking a picture or in the process of trying to get a picture when all of a sudden I notice something else, like a bonus prize, that happens as a result of my original picture taking impulse. Like these mushrooms, for instance. I stopped to take a picture of them because they're yellow (which is going to be next week's color of the week for this photography thingy that I'm doing with my siblings), and while I was focusing on them I realized that they were moving which in turn led me to focus on the bugs that were crawling around all over them. Interesting bugs, which I wouldn't have seen at all if I hadn't stopped to take the picture of the mushrooms.

This also happened last week with a tree I meant to photograph with my camera phone because I wanted something different as the wallpaper image and I nearly stepped on a pygmy rattlesnake in the process and so I took a not very good picture of that instead. Camera phones of the sort that I have are very limiting. I need to work on this, but you can see it's a snake, right? I thought so.

Effectivenessity

Sometimes I take pictures because something sticks out. Like this orange saw palmetto branch in among all the green ones. And then sometimes I get the picture on my screen and decide what's obvious to me out in the wild doesn't seem so obvious when it's digitized.

So here's another version that I made using Picasa. Very cool. Lots of fun. Almost postcard worthy.

And then here's one more version that I used Picasa's Picnik software to play with. Yow!