Oh my, thanks for posting this. So many favorites - the drops shots for sure. Blue Mammoth (?) with red Japanese maple. Shot pointing skyward through 2 evergreens. Is that Nelly Moser? But my favorite shot was of the spindly seedling tree with no leaves yet. THAT'S the kind of picture that a gardener likes. Because for sure what you were seeing when you took the picture is what you hope it will be someday. Christine

Lori, I was literally close enough to touch her soft, fuzzy nose and was *very* tempted. Janie, those are elk. The one who is facing the camera would not leave me alone. I kept trying to get a clear shot of the males rutting in the background and she would come right up to my face and stand there. Running to another location just made her follow me. I had to snap photos before she caught up with me. I have dozens of photos of her face in my camera. LOL I should have linked to the better upload at YouTube earlier. Following the link below, you will see a better quality slide show and a clearer reflection of me and Rita in the moose's eyeball. Jodi- Here is a link that might be useful: Much better quality slideshow

Circular Congregrational Church - church cemetery with St. Michaels church in the background.

Sorry, I haven't been checking in here regularly. I'm not sure what "universally compatible" means or means to you. It's a common format because it takes up less room and is acceptable to most people because many don't pay attention to sound quality. Any MP3 sounds inferior to any lossless or WAV file, it's a fact with a well known cause. There are many things that are widely used that are inferior to alternatives - most fast and processed food items fit this description. No more need be said. Audio files are put on CDs in a form of WAV. When you rip a CD to a lossless format (whether FLAC or Apple's ALAC) you get a file that's identical data wise to the CD but about half as large and with the ability to hold tags (metadata). WAV is impractical because they're so big. FLAC and ALAC are like Zip files for data - if you take a WAV file and process it to produce a lossless file and then reverse the process by processing the lossless file back to WAV, the second WAV file and the first will be bit for bit identical. When ripping files, it's inevitable that tags need a bit of sprucing up. Many of the free rippers (EAC, iTunes, Windows Media) offer rudimentary tag info and cover files but in an incomplete way. There are programs to help tagging (free MP3 Tag is my favorite, can be used on any kind of sound file) and most refer to any of the several free online databases like MusicBrainz or Discogs for the info. What you should do is tag your "good" lossless rips and then if MP3 versions are needed, rip the FLAC or ALACs to MP3s as a separate step because the tag data will go along with it. I use Foobar to do the conversions and you can set it up to put the MP3s in folders just the same as your "good" versions are in. It can be done in one, however large batch process that can be set up to do thousands of files at once. It doesn't happen instantaneously, it can take hours. Remember that you can convert an MP3 to a FLAC or ALAC file but once it's been processed from WAV to MP3, data is lost and changing the format to lossless doesn't restore it. My wife's car won't play FLAC files, and she also has a portable player for music as for plane flights, so this is an example where it's quick and easy to process MP3s from CD quality rips when needed. Otherwise, it's the CD quality rips that are used.