Great shots Mike. That lonely bloom is beautiful on it's own. And I will have to agree with you on the cursing of the wind at times. And great to know you're expecting soon. Hoyas of course. ;)

Eddie

Mike, it is typical for pro photographers, whether photographing flowers or photographing naked women, to take thousands of pictures just to get a handful of good shots! I read once about a National Geographic photo expedition of polar bears, the number of ROLLS of film shot was in the tens of thousands for a 6 page spread in the magazine!!

These are gorgeous, the ruby-like glow of the light coming thru the first one is beautiful, especially with the green behind it ( not sure if you know that green and red are opposites on the color wheel and are very complimentary to each other )

The second one has a sort of lonely feel, and the detail is awesome. I find it amazing that digital cameras can produce such great photographs, I can't seem to get shots like this with my digital! I also have a Cannon Rebel (not the digital one) and the shots are much better, but I am one of those people who takes pictures and never gets the film developed.....5 years from now it will cost me $500 to develop the 50 or 60 rolls I have laying around, and I will go thru the pictures and be like "What the heck is that? When did I take that picture? Who are those people?"
or "Oh my god look how young Morgan was...!!" etc etc

Ah well, for now I will just enjoy everyone elses photos.

Thanks for the compliments Eddie and Ines.

I feel fortunate to be able to get any acceptable shots with my 5 megapixel "point and shoot" Canon... I have a very nice 35mm Nikon with the 50mm Nikkor Micro lens and ring flash, but I rarely use it anymore; I don't have a good transparency-to-digital converter, so any slides I take just languish... (I also have the habit of waiting until I have multiple rolls to develop before I take them in!)

Someday, when the kids don't eat up so much of our "discretionary" income, I'll buy a digital body to go behind the lenses and get a "Cool Scan" slide converter to transfer my thousands of dusty tranparencies to jpg's...

Mike