Hi every one! Can you believe it? I still cannot believe my luck and I was there!!! Again while on my way to work this morning there was someone white and *quite* chunky looking flying across the road. I pulled over, backed up a bit, and admired a stunningly beautiful snowy Owl perched on top of a utility pole. This one was much larger than the first Owl I had seen and was more heavily barred. The barring seemed darker / black. I believe this Owl was a female as her face, nape of the neck and center of the breast were white. From what I was able to research that does describe the female snowy. Maybe this was an immature but I did not find much description of them. Any way ... I am 113% sure this was another Snowy Owl! What a wonderful start to the day! As my luck would have it, I did not have my camera in the car for the past week. Had the camera been there then for sure the Owl would NOT! LOL! So that was a great start to the day. I was 20 minutes late to work but work is just soooo over-rated. LOL! The rest of the day was downhill but who cares? I saw another Snowy Owl! The Owl was about 1 mile south of the earlier sighting on Rt. 83 in N. Ridgeville again. C3D and 2 Snowy sightings this year!

First of all, you do not need to learn how to work with Camera Raw format. That format offers you abilities to do work on an image that a JPG doesn't, but if you mostly want to publish photos on the Web, then working with good quality JPGs is going to be quite sufficient. And yes, digital cameras all produce some degree of "noise" in images. It works pretty much the same way as film does: the higher the light sensitivity (ASA) the more visible the grain or "noise" becomes. So if you are setting your camera with a very high light sensitivity, 1600 ASA for example, the noise ("graininess") in the photos will go way up. Setting the sensitivity as low as you can is always advisable as long as it doesn't compromise your getting a sharp, clear image. Getting a good image depends on three basic factors: 1) shutter speed - the duration of the opening of the shutter must be as short as possible, within reason, to eliminate any motion of the subject or shaking of the camera operator's hands. Generally you want to use a shutter speed of at least 1/125 of a second or less. 2) depth of field - this controls how sharp the photo is by determining how much of the subject from closest-to-camera to furthest-from-camera is within the range of focus of the lens. Depth of field is determined by how small a lens opening (aperture) you set. It is usually a balancing act between shutter speed and aperture to get lots of depth of field and still use a fast enough shutter speed to eliminate any motion. Most inexpensive digital cameras don't allow you much (or any) control over these settings and simply make a decision for you. This isn't always ideal, but you may not get a full range of features from a camera in your affordability range. If possible, look for a camera that does allow you some manual control. 3) image quality settings - set the ISO/ASA ("film speed" or light sensitivity) as low as lighting conditions will allow. I personally enjoy shooting under overcast conditions which I feel best displays the full range of color of flowers and eliminates hard shadows and highlights. On a cloudy day you can often get a much more painterly look than a bright day. This means you may have to set the camera's light sensitivity to a higher setting, like 400 ASA/ISO or even higher, in order to get both a fast shutter speed and reasonable depth of field. (Keep in mind that depth of field is optional for some kinds of photos: sometimes you don't want everything to be sharply in focus from front to back, and so you may want to shoot with the lens wide open = very little depth of field) Under cloudy conditions I will often set the camera sensitivity to 400 or even 800 if necessary. If you are very lucky and the air is very still, you can use a tripod and leave the ASA/ISO setting way down at 100 (or however low your camera allows) and when you do that, you are reducing the "noise" in the image to minimum. I work exclusively with a Nikon D80 and I find that at its lowest ASA/ISO (which is 100) I can get a very large image that shows next to no noise. Even when I turn up the sensitivity to 800, I can still get a very good image with very little image noise. Its only when I turn sensitivity up to 1600 or more that image noise becomes very noticeable. A few other points: Jeri mentioned image editing software. Your needs are probably going to be very basic at the start and so perhaps Photoshop Elements might be all you need. I'm not sure what other tools might be available in the cheap-to-free range. I gather that Google's Picasa offers the basic photo editing tools. See link below. If you are up to grappling with a fairly steep learning curve, there is a free Photoshop type editing suite called The Gimp and it is almost as powerful as the full Photoshop suite, minus a few of the tools and filters. There are plenty of tutorials online to help you learn how to use it. Also, as Cass mentioned, if you are working on an OS X iMac (as I do) then you can do many image manipulations using the built in iPhoto tools. I can't tell you much about iPhoto though, since I use Photoshop CS4 as my tool of choice. If you can get your head around the idea of buying a used camera, you will undoubtedly get a lot more camera for your money. You might be lucky enough to get a DSLR for what you have to spend. I sold my Nikon D70 two years ago for less than half what I paid for it and the person who bought it got a really good deal. It was an excellent camera and I'm sure it still has years of service in it. So, you may want to consider buying second hand. People often sell their current camera to upgrade to a newer, more capable one (as I did) and there is absolutely nothing wrong with the camera they are selling, they just want to move up a level. Finally, if you already have an understanding of the basics of film camera photography, then you already know most of what is important in digital photography. All of the same basic principles apply to both, its just a matter of learning how to use the specific camera controls to get what you need from a digital. No need to be intimidated by digital imaging, especially if you have a friend who cam teach you along the way. Regards, Paul B. Here is a link that might be useful: Picasa

here are my c , at least what i have uploaded wich is not of individual pic more group shots of the gardens... christmas tree gala (2pic) captain kirk with a nice robin bird poop on it :(

Heidi, I followed your links back to you album and can't see a way to post the individual pictures on here but am able to post a link to the album that you have the pictures you were trying to post from earlier. Without further ado, here is Heidi and her family! (see link below) All of you are adorable. I especially love your little pancake helper and Donald Duck Jr. The boys are so cute! You and your hubby look so happy in your wedding photo. you have a wonderful family!