Sherry, beautiful photos of a wonderful assortment of butterflies. You are so blessed to have the land and the environment to provide so much diversity of plant life for the little creatures. Since you mentioned the constraints of the software that came with your new camera, there is free photo editing software called Picasa 3 by google that is very good for basic editing, cropping and easy uploading. It allows you at least a gig of free web album space and provides the code to use to insert photos into the Gardenweb forums. This is what I use for much of my editing, cropping and uploading for use on-line. You might want to take a look at it since it's 'free'. No cost to evaluate and keep, if it meets your needs. Here's a link to my Picasa garden web album, that I've been adding to for a couple of years. Nothing special here but when I want to share a photo with a friend or insert code for a photo into a forum message, it's really quick and simple to do. This will give you an idea of how the photos present on-line. The nice thing is, as long as I leave the photo in the album, it will always display, no matter how old the forum message gets to be. With all of these photos, I've only used a small fraction of my free web album space. You can also create different web albums and assign some to be private albums; for instance, family photos you might wish to share among your family. __Garden Flowers - plants I so enjoy your (and everyone's) photos so please post more frequently. ~Mary Here is a link that might be useful: Picasa 3 - free photo editing software & on-line album space

Thank You. This shot screamed for the Black and white transformation. I don't do that usually. It is so easy these days with digital that it feels like cheating. I am an old Black and White photographer and lab printer back in the day so the ease just feels sinful. I guess I need to get over it. The first day of the bloom they are very Yellow and the second it goes more yellow silver. If it is more in the sun it gets hints of pale salmon in the silver. I have it more in the shade now with morning sun. It got new sun scars this year due to my inattention when we soured early to 108 and it was still out in the all day sun area while I was out driving around working. I have had two small ones bloom this year. I fertilized with More Bloom an alaskan product that is no Nitrogen . I use it once a week at 1/4 dilution. I think this large one has bloomed 4 or 5 times this summer.

Thanks Everyone! My wife has always thought I took nice photos, so she encouraged me to get some nice gear and spend some time learning how to use it. Laura, We enjoyed the salsa. Your Echinopsis bloom this past year? Dawn, It did fine. The important things are in the house. Didn't want to chance it. Susan, We've always wanted to get a telescope, but never have for some reason. Amber is healthy now and slowly increasing her hours in the gym. She is focusing on getting all her skills back for competition next year. Took this the other day of her playing mama. :-) randy

aokat: it is some hand woven rug from a local store, I don't know if it is a "brand" or something, sorry. phyl: it is Rosemary Sprig from BM. The tiles are from Pewabic Pottery in Detroit. They are from the "stratton collection" and come in that size which is 3x3 and they are just fixed regularly with grout. I custom ordered the tiles from them, they have a choice of about 10 or 12 standard colors to pick from.