Toddler Gobblers

Everyone knows kids love to put things in their mouths, especially things they find outside. With all the damp weather we've had the last several years there's been a proliferation of fungus growth to be found in lawns and gardens. The son-in-law came up with a unique idea to keep the grandbaby away from them - he called them "toddler gobblers" and told her they'd eat her up if she got too close. LOL

Despite the weather being a little on the cool side off and on, it's still been rather damp and we had a crop of mushroom spring up on the front lawn. Despite the fact they were growing in a semi circle, they did not invoke the sense of a fairy ring in me. These particular mushrooms look more like a ring to repel magic rather than draw it in. Still, I couldn't resist taking a picture of some of them.

The Fog Is Very Thick Today . . .

Every photographer has their own unique approach for taking pictures, and apparently mine is to take as many possible and hope one (or more) turn out okay. LOL

I was down at the west beach a couple of times this week, once to take pictures of the monarchs that are attracted to the goldenrod, and once to take pictures in the fog.

The first time I went down in the fog, the fog was heavier than I expected and obscured a lot of what I wanted to photograph. Then the battery ran out in my camera and when I went back about an hour later the fog had lifted enough to take the romance out of the landscape. *sigh* Maybe next time

Of all the pictures I took (about 90 all in all), this one is my favorite. I may not always get along with spiders, but there's something magical about their webs, don't you think?

Picture This

Photography is something I was pretty serious about at one time. When I was in high school I was a member of the photo club, where I learned how to develop black and white film, I subscribed to a photography magazine, and dreamed of some day owning a Canon SLR camera. I was going to be a photo journalist and work for National Geographic.

It’s pretty obvious that neither the dream of the camera nor the dream of the career ever came to pass. I’ve owned many cameras over the years, none of which were my dream camera. I came close once with one of the early digital Canon cameras, but it wasn’t an SLR.

About a year ago when we thought we were going on an Alaskan cruise, I treated myself to a brand new camera – a Canon Rebel DSLR. I finally had my dream camera. There was only one problem though –I didn’t know how to make it work.

Laugh if you will, but my first few days with my new camera were very frustrating. The instructions that came with it might as well have been written in Chinese for all I could understand them. I got it to take one picture, but couldn’t get it to take a second one.

Fortunately, the daughter is a real photography and showed me some basics. But she already has a lot on her plate with little enough free time as it is, and I have a lot to learn. So I’m going to take a night school course in photography and hopefully have some fun while I’m learning.

I’m sure the course will include lots of practice – with a digital camera at my disposal, why not? A friend and I just finished a 52 week challenge using only pictures from our phone (if you’re curious you can find the results HERE) and I figured it might be kind of fun to share some of the photos I’ll be taking with my camera as well.

The course doesn’t start until May, so in the meantime I’ll be sharing random pictures from my camera every Friday. After the course starts I’ll post the best picture from each week’s lesson.

To start the ball rolling I have a picture of the lakeshore near where I live. It was taken in September last year. If you'd like to see a bigger version of it, just click on it.