Isn't taking pictures fun! Good looking photos. I was wondering if my Heuchera Peppermint was OK. I didn't see the veining on the leaf that I did last year. I was wondering if the new flush of leaves would develop the veining in time. Yours is looking similar. So I think mine is OK too.

I'm not sure if they've been introduced in the last ten years but the newer ones to me that have grown well are: Reptillian Cutting Edge Mack the Knife Black Hills Christmas Pagent Sentimental Journey Alex Summers The ones below I got last year. Some were from the middle of the summer and some were at the very end and looking as ratty as could be. In spite of that all of the following have really taken off. They've passed up many of my much older plants. Lacy Belle Carolina Blue Carolina Sunshine Li'l Abner Ice Cream Arc de Triomphe Bob Deane Chesterland Gold Anne Kulpa Fire Island Iron Gate Glamour (this may be an older one but boy did it grow! It's in pure, hot sun and looks great) Ophir Orange Marmalade Satisfaction Summer Breeze Pieter, have you tried Morning Light in lots of sun with lots of water? Mine was very slow growing too with only some morning sun. This year I replaced it with Christmas Candy which was twice as big in one year. I put Morning Light in a pot on the west side balcony with a few others. It gets full, boiling sun from early afternoon to sunset. It's way too hot to be on this balcony for humans. It is doing wonderful without a mark on the center, white part. I'll post a picture once we see if it's ok with Maureen on this thread (as Janice said above). By the way - my Twilight is by far the darkest black/green of any of my plants. It's amazing. McT

Back in the 60's I began learning serious photography by working with a Century Graphic 4x5 press camera and an Argus C-3 35mm range finder camera. Neither of which had a light meter and I did not have a handheld light meter so I had to learn how to eyeball the exposure. Actually it is not as difficult as one might expect, and I still set my DSLR on manual and play with eyeballing exposures just to see if I still have the touch. Back in the mid 1800's every photographer had to make his/her own photo sensitive plates. Even though every photographer was using basically the same system to make the plates, there was still an element of inconsistancy from one to another, so they each had to experiment to determine the correct exposure for their plates. When George Eastman began commercially making plates and film in the late 1800's he needed some type of index to standardize the exposure so he could tell photographers how to use his product. Understanding that the film might be used anywhere on earth it then stood that they needed an index for the brightest light, and a set of guidelines on how to compensate for the conditions where ever one might use the film. The brightest sunlight occurs at noon at the equator so they tested the film at the equator and determined how much time it took to get a proper exposure with the lens set at f-16. The time was then called the ASA rating for the film, thus if you use your film in bright mid day sun at the equator you could set your aperture to f-16 and your shutter speed to equal the ISO number and you would get a proper exposure. As you move north of south from the equator the angle of incidence of the sunlight decreases so you have to compensate the exposure, thus in North America when shooting in bright mid day sun we have to open the lens one f-stop, therefore to get a normal exposure we would use the ISO number for shutter speed and set the aperture to f-11. Now divide the time from noon till sundown. In the first one third of that time the exposure is the same as at noon. In the next one third of the time open one f-stop (f-8) and in the last one third open two stops (f5.6). Next, open one more stop for shade or on a totally overcast day and in mid winter we open one more f-stop. Keep in mind that if you double shutter speed that will reduce the exposure by one f-stop and if you reduce the shutter speed by 1/2 that has the same effect as opening int aperture one f-stop. Back in the days of film cameras we had to select the film speed before we set out, but with the modern digital you can change the ISO any time you want to. Here again, if you double the ISO number (I.E. 200 to 400) that has the same effect as opening the aperture one f-stop). Beleive me, after you spend a couple days shooting by this method you will have an entirely new respect for the built in light meter and exposure controls on modern cameras.

Ah well, dragging toes in the dirt, when I bought my Kodak 3400 some years back, it was then pretty XXXY. It was a reward for myself for finally getting up the courage to go to the dentist for some major pain. I loved the camera then and I still do, though whew the improvements and the price drops since then!. Still the wisest words the camera salesman ever told me was -- don't drop back and look in the window next week. I saw Ian's camera at his open garden, it looks fantastic and takes incredible shots. Mind you, for half what I paid some years back, you now get 3 times the resolution!!!