Beautiful photos! Many thanks to everyone for the visual treats. Gazania - what kind of flower is the butterfly standing on? It's such a lovely pristine background for the butterfly.

We spent the last two weeks on Block Island. One of the highlights of the trip was joining the Block Island Club. My wife's family always used to join when they came to the island when she was growing up, and her father even helped import the first 420 sailboats the club used. Its friendly and low key, and has sailboats, kayaks, paddleboards, a couple of tennis courts with a really good instructor, and even held a potluck cocktail party one evening.A sailboat race hosted by the club.The clubhouse.The sunset cocktail party.The view from the tennis courts as a scary storm moved in.

The above underwater pictures were heavily post-processed using Picasa. The human eye is pretty good at automatically adjusting the color balance so that what you see looks more vibrant. Here are a couple of the underwater pictures as they looked right out of the camera: and the "after" versions: At least with my camera and its waterproof case, it is really hard to see what you are taking a picture of, especially if you are zoomed in a fair bit. Starting with the none-too-bright LCD display of the camera, which is hard enough to see in brightly lit conditions, put it in the waterproof case which adds another layer of plastic, and then add in the swim mask your are wearing which is usually a little bit fogged, and it is mostly a guess as to what you are taking a picture of. The fact that the sea urchin in the earlier images is centered and in focus, at the equivalent of a 300mm zoom is beyond lucky. On one of the three attempts at snorkeling on the island the glass lens of the waterproof case fogged up, pretty much ruining most of that set of images. Below is the best one of that set straight from the camera, and after post-processing.

Big bug (1" or more) that kept bouncing off of the door's glass panel last night. It flew to the lights when I went to see what was making all the noise. Anyone know what it is?