Gone Feral In Idaho

It is unbearably cold but I got a set of diopters to fake a macro lens so Sadie and I did a walk about the yard in the last of the day's and year's light to capture some of the colors of the season. Everything is pretty dead and muted, I picked these four out: I found that all is not drab and ugly,  Happy New Year!

From Me and Kyle and Sadiepants to you and yours- Happy Holidays! And to all a good night.

Just a quick photo of this year's luminaries for the celebration of the days getting longer to come. Here's to the longer days ahead! Warmth to you and yours this holiday season.

I got a new camera. Well O.K. I got a new DSLR and then quickly learned that my money wasn't that well spent and I was lucky enough to upgrade with only the loss of the cost for the backup battery for the first one that won't work with the new one. I'll take that loss any day. What I ended up doing was getting a camera that I could grow and learn with. It has some dummy settings for the times I get flustered, but I'm already comfy with shooting in Aperture priority mode, so I consider that a sign of moving forward. Unfortunately, I fall into the category of consumer that completely over analyzes everything. I am a professional Internet investigator. Like a present day Colin Laney I scrub the Internet for any last detail on anything to find any shred if information I can. Unlike work stuff, I can sometimes run into dubious territory like I did with my latest research on my new D7000. I found this wonderful site. I thought to myself, "what a goldmine". Ugh. ...

  Its here! Yay! It is big and beefy (to me, I wear large gloves at work). I had the 35mm 1.8 lens already and I've only taken a few shots because it arrived during blackberry jam making and I had no desire to get jam on my new camera. The button and dial locations make so much more sense to me. It still has a few "safety net" settings, but this is going to be my new school for a while. Unfortunately I'm beat from canning and present making, so any semi-decent photos won't be happening right away. I can't wait to see what Emily's new purchase looks like. Shot with my super-awesome Panasonic Lumix that will continue to be my go-to point and shoot.

No photos for this post, as I have no camera. I have a few really neat lenses and a flash, but I returned the very nice Nikon D5100 to Costco today. I love those guys. They seem to get it that since they don't have experts on the floor to help with choosing merchandise, they'll take returns with very few to no questions asked. I bought the D5100 in a kit with two lenses for a great price of just under 1,000 bucks. It included a bag, a 16GB SD card, a bunch of DVD,s, battery, charger, connectors, and a camera strap- not too bad.  This was my first personal DSLR (we use them at work, but not artistically). It took great photographs and had the versatility my old point and shoot could in no way keep up with. I  pushed that point and shoot hard, I learned how to tweak it to it's fullest extent, but it was never going to reach my creative expectations. The D5100 has a great sensor in it for sure. The first problem I noticed was more the body construction and design, such as ...