Tag Archives: neighborhood walk

The answer, my friend

Abby, Gina and I took one of our many neighborhood walks on Thursday. I snapped these dogwood blossoms blowing in a stiff wind in the late afternoon sunlight. I loves me some dogwoods. Some in this area have been truly spectacular this year. Last year they got zotted in the epic April freeze.

Blowing Dogwoods

My 30-day trial of Photoshop CS3 ran out and I haven’t wrangled another copy, so I downloaded a free trial of Lightroom. Lightroom doesn’t do all the neat stuff PS does, but it does have camera raw and I can always go back to using The Gimp. Anyway, Lightroom has these presets, one of which makes photos look aged. That’s what I used on this dogwood photo. I like the effect.

Abby is a big fan of picking stuff up and examining it. She amazes me by generally knowing what to pick up and what not to. She’ll always pick up acorns and worms and ladybugs. She won’t pick up spiders and snakes. So far, at least. While we were on our walk she bent over until her face almost touched the ground and yelled, “Caterpillar.” A closer inspection by Gina revealed the caterpillar was actually one of those pollen pods from an oak tree. Abby said, “Oh” and moved on to other things.