A Few of My Favorite Things...

I am taking a photography class at the FIA. I took photography classes MANY YEARS AGO when I was in highschool and I got very comfortable with my Pentax k1000--the classic photography student's first camera: relatively cheap, reliable, heavy and virtually indestructable. (I dropped that camera into the Yellowstone river and then later on a cement pathway in East Berlin and it still took great pictures!) But the world has moved on and now I have a digital camera (a Nikon--eee!!!!) that is light as a feather and can do ANYTHING (or so the manual tells me) but I can't figure the damn thing out. So I am in a class, with other people that really belong in an Agatha Christie murder mystery: there's the guy who only "shoots raw," the woman who wonders whether or not her memory card will be in b/w or color, another woman who "LOVES taking picture of children--ANY CHILDREN," and the guy who claims that "all photography is prevarication." So far I have learned a little more about how to used my camera (and a lot about what it could do if I only knew how to do it). Here are a few of my first photos:

This is late afternoon, looking up through our grape vines. I spend quite a lot of time in our backyard but never really noticed how many bugs there were until I really got up close and personal to everything.
Most of our yard is surrounded by hedges (which I refuse to trim too rigorously because it is unnatural but the result is that we can barely fit the cars down the driveway as they close in on us more every year) which get covered in tiny flowers (I think I am allergic to the pollen) which attacts THOUSANDS of bees.

This taro used to be 3 feet tall but suffered from poor care while spending the winter in my office. The plant died back to the ground and I thought it was all over, but after a series of amazing thunderstorms, these signs of life appeared.

More bugs enjoying themselves. I think these are fireflies.

We have an enormous tree stump in our backyard which is an ecosystem all of its own. Sometimes as I head to the compost pile it hides I can hear buzzing and scratching coming from within it. It had bark when we moved here 10 years ago, but most has fallen off. A few days ago several hundred mushrooms appeared during the night.