This was the most creative I could get for a Monday. A picture of my handmade mug collection. Oh well. At least it’s something.

My loving husband caught on that I wanted a digital SLR camera for my birthday. It only took 3 months worth of hints, buy hey, who’s counting? So a Nikon D60 package arrived a few days ago. I have to admit, I was a little intimidated at first. Being a computer engineer, I’m used to throwing around acronyms and having entire conversations in tech code…but this was different. Photographers have just as much, if not more, cryptic jargon than computer geeks, and I remember very little of it from my high school, 35mm, dark room days. It also didn’t help that I had seen an entire shelf of Nikon books at Barnes and Noble, with no less than 5 books (huge suckers too) dedicated just to the D60…so I was a little scared.

After a few days of just looking at all the pretty little boxes, I eventually sat down and managed to go through each piece and part that had arrived. It was like a 30 piece set or something! Tripods, 4 lenses, filters…of course some of it is just filler stuff: LCD plastic protector sheets, lense cleaner fluid, etc., but it was still a little overwhelming. Kind of like that first time at a spinning wheel…all that talk about tension, flyers, Z twists, etc. It’s enough to make you go running in the other direction!

It took a few hours, but I eventually got all the bits inside the camera bag and a lens on the camera last night. Today I got the software installed on the Mac, and was ready to give it a first try.

LOVE IT.

Here is one of the first pictures. Shot with a basic Nikon 18-55mm lens. No Photoshop touchups. Straight off the camera, then shrank to a JPG for the web. The original RAW image of this will blow up so large I can actually see all the individual veins on the leaf. Awesome. This is going to be great for taking yarn pictures!

After mindlessly cropping and color correcting virtual piles of photos, it’s so easy to forget just how much fun Photoshop really is. It’s a brilliant tool. And using it for such menial tasks is like eating microwave pizza on Wedgewood. Quite nearly a crime. So after browsing through some shots I took last fall, I spent a little time playing around.

The snow was a no-show, but ice has encased everything. No school. No work.

I couldn’t avoid venturing out to feed the sheep, so I made the most of the trek outside and took pictures. It was eerily quiet, but then the wind would blow and the trees would creak and groan under the weight of the ice. Then every few minutes a loud crash would erupt from the woods as branches and trees fell under the strain. I made a point to not walk under any trees when hauling the hay from the barn, just in case. Scary.

More pictures on Flickr…

There is a wonderful section of the BBC where people submit their photos of Scotland. Sometimes it amazes me how incredibly beautiful these amateur pictures can be. Browsing the new postings each Friday has become one of my weekly rituals.

- photo by Drew Fisher of Kirkwood Farm near Strathaven, Scotland

- photo by Stevie Manson of Troon, Scotland

- photo by Donald Mackinnon of Harris, Scotland

These are from the 9 Jan – 16 Jan Gallery, but there are many others equally as beautiful in the other galleries.