We saw flamingos on our trip to the zoo last week. I love taking pictures at the zoo. It would have been better if it wasn’t so hot but still it was a fun time. It is great to go to places that you have lots of photo subjects. Fun day. Wish I could go to the zoo every week.

These sunflowers are some my mom planted. They look way better than mine. Of course, she planted hers in the garden while I planted mine in a pot. More of mine actually grew than I had expected, so I think they crowded each other out. Her sunflowers are gorgeous and some are really tall. Those may actually had edible seeds. I love planting sunflowers since they grow so tall and are low maintenance.

My nephews discovered a bird’s nest in the tree they love to play around. At first I tried my telephoto lens but then realized that I could get much closer without disturbing anything than I originally thought. I may try to take a photo a day or every two days to document their growth.

My sunflowers are beginning to bloom. This type is my favorite. I just love the rich, dark colors. And I had forgotten how much I love my Sigma telephoto lens. I took some pictures yesterday with it and loved the results. You can definitely tell the focus of this picture with the blurred background. Makes me want to take more pictures – which is a good thing because lately it seems all I’ve been doing are pictures for eBay. As my daughter would say, “that’s so boring.”

I think I may plant more sunflowers like a small patch just for taking photos. Maybe by the time they bloom it will be a little cooler! Oh well, a girl can dream.

This morning I went to shoot a couple of pictures of some flowers I bought this weekend. My lens immediately fogged up as it was already pretty balmy outside – especially coming from a nice, cool house. Anyway, it almost looks like I used some sort of filter or something.

I will take some more pictures once I re-pot the flower. I bought it because I thought it was really pretty plus it loves the heat and blooms all summer.

Look what my daughter made at pre-school. It’s just too cute. The flowers are made from the fingerprints. The teacher glued gun the stones in place but Raegan told her where to put them. I think it’s adorable and hope that I don’t kill the flowers. I love flowers but have terrible luck keeping them alive.

So, I was cropping a picture with IrFanView when I decided to play with some of the settings. Since our hard drive crashed a while ago, I don’t have anything installed(that I use) to touch up photos. I found a setting for color swap, so I did that, changing RGB for RBG.

I liked how it looks so I saved it. This gives me some ideas for other photos to give them a more ‘artsy’ look. It’s so fun to play with different settings.

Here is the original.

I love this time of year. So many flowers are in bloom. My mom’s yard looks so wonderful. It’s hard to stay inside and do anything these days knowing there is such beauty outside. Her garden inspires me to plant more at our house and even try some indoor plants. Her rose bushes are really pretty right now. Roses seem to be high maintenance so I’ve never really wanted one. But seeing how beautiful they can be makes me think they are worth the effort.

We had snow yesterday and it was beautiful. Several inches of the white stuff fell. I loved how the snow clung to this red maple tree. It looked like a glass tree.

We made snow angels, had snowball fights and built a snowman. If my daughter was a little older then I’m sure she would have wanted to sled down the hill in our front yard. Maybe next snow – but the way we get snow like this she may be closer to my age by then.

So technically this photo cannot count as my photo of the day since it was taken around 11:30pm last night – when it was still Thursday and 2009. But I couldn’t resist trying to photograph the moon. The clouds were in the way and it made me wish I had taken some when the moon was lower in the sky and it was a clear night.

Today starts my photo a day project that I had tried last year but wavered. This year I hope to take at least one photo a day. To make it more interesting, I plan to have a new theme each month and explore more of the settings on my DSLR. My January theme will be buildings. Might as well start off with a pretty straightforward theme. After all I do plan to start eating less and exercising more today. (Not a diet, just making a healthy change in my life) This way I won’t stress too much about subjects while I’m starving and ache all over.