Here are two pictures that I took. The first one is using an auto setting on the camera. When you use an auto setting the camera looks at all the colors and averages all of them to a gray setting. This picture is very gray. The next picture was taken with the camera on the snow setting. This allows more light into the camera and basically overexposes the picture but in doing so, the snow is actually now a white not gray in color. Brenda

Hi everyone, Well, I am double posting this in 2 forums - I hope nobody minds. As promised, here I am posting about what in the world I've been doing all summer while traveling to & fro Wisconsin. As some of you already know, I work with fish-eating birds: cormorants, pelicans, herons, egrets, gulls, wood storks, etc. My husband and I have been working in Wisconsin for the past 3 years, but we also regularly work in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Michigan, Ontario, and a few other places. Yes, we are a husband + wife team, working together out of the same office. Many people are surprised that we work together, but it is great. We make a fantastic team, and are often at our best under challenging field conditions. Great minds think alike, and being dear friends & in love sure helps too. (ok, enough with the mushy stuff). So now for a few photos from the vegetation surveys we did this month. Background: We are working on remote islands in Lake Michigan, around the Door Co. Peninsula area. All the islands have nesting double-crested cormorants and herring gulls. Some also have nesting Am. white pelicans and Canada geese. Back in April, we put up some 6 ft x 6 ft pens (we call them exclosures) to exclude the cormorants because they damage vegetation with their nesting activities (too much POOP!). So then we went back in August to catalog everything that grew in the pens, by plant species, and weighed it to also determine biomass. That meant breaking out the field guides, studying up on botany and the flora of Wisconsin, and bringing the plant presses for species we couldn't identify on the island. We compareed the exclosure plots to some "control" plots, which had nothing but 4 wooden stakes at the corners. We had 45 plots to do on 3 islands, plus another 3 islands down by the city of Green Bay that we did simple vegetation surveys on (no pens). It was alot of work, but very interesting. The bottom line: there are lots of nonnative species on those islands, like motherwort, catnip, pigweed, common mallow, stinging nettle and sow thistle. The native vegetation was primarily lambsquarter and smartweed species. Almost done clipping this 1-meter plot: Looking for small plants beneath the lambsquarter The finished, sampled 1-meter subplot Who would even know what this was?!?! I saved seeds to winter sow and see if I can't figure it out. The very last veg plot to measure. You can tell, because we look so happy! A friend found crawling across the plant press The stinging nettle I hacked through to make us a nice trail to get to the center of the island. At least its not poison ivy! Ok, that's all for now. Have a great evening. Katie (heh - I've been working on this post for days!)

Nice fish !

Tried Manual settings exclusively yesterday, I haven't touched on that til then...Had it since Dec 2005... Settings: 1st TN 60S F5 2nd TN 40S F5 Regular 30S F5 REgular 25S F5 Last TN 20S F5 Taken in shade, on the ground No flash Exif says 4.7mm away from obect, I'm not sure how much that is, but in inch talk about 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 inches away Used elbow to help steady camera Set on Manual Mode with macros on Camera:FujiFinePix E500 4.1 megapix, 3.2x optical zoom I think I like the 30s or 25s F5 setting best...I've concluded you must not be in a hurry when use manual settings but I think they would make great focused pictures to print...I've also noticed when I edited any of the higher (lower), don't have the language down yet, kind of reminds of tring to understand algebra, exposures that you could edited them easy enough with gamma, brightness and contrast which looks half way decent... I did no editing whatsoever on any of them...