Uneventful? Maybe Not

I'm back! I'm back! Hooray, hooray! I'm back!

So, what am I so excited and happy about? I was just thinking about how good it is to be here. Where else would I rather want to be than to be writing about my favorite thing, nature. I also had a fun, but rather uneventful day out taking pictures. And I actually made a little bit of progress on a few things.

I went out with the full intention of taking pictures of plants. I also wanted to use the focus on my camera in only manual mode, which I did. I thought this would help me learn how to always get good pictures of my more closeup subjects.

You can see that better focus in my picture of the bug-eaten leaf above. The leaf is nothing special, but I wanted to share a really good look at the plants I'm studying. I've learned absolutely nothing about the plants, but I'm learning to study their details a bit more.

The second picture shows the fluffy seedpods at the top of another plant of the first one's kind. I find it interesting that it was hard to focus on the seedpods. I think I did a good job in the end, but it lost a lot of the sharpness and detail when I resized the image.

I was able to put some of the sharpness back, but most of the detail seems to be lost. I'm not sure there's anything I can do to keep that when I resize something like this. It's a shame I have to do it.

I have to resize the images to 800x600 for two related reasons. The first one is to reduce the image size so you don't have to wait forever for my images to load. The second reason is because if we reduce our images down to 800 pixels or below then Blogger doesn't count the image size against our storage space. We could theoretically upload unlimited images that way.

This last picture is what I consider a bit of a failure. You can see by the stems of these little flowers that the picture is plenty sharp enough, but the flowers came out way too bright, and all the detail of them was lost. That's a shame. That's something I think I need to figure out how to more easily correct.

So that's all the little stuff I'm excited about right at the moment. It's not much, but I'm making progress on my photography and learning plants. I'll make bigger leaps as I begin to put the smaller pieces together. It won't take long at all for someone like me who can become obsessed with things like this. It's gonna be fun!

One more thing I want to let you know about is a guest article we have over at Nature Center Magazine today. The article explains which plants can help attract hummingbirds. Take a look if you want some of those little wonders to come around.

I'll be back soon!