Nothing like photography to take the sting out of eye surgery...

I am back.

I had invasive eye surgery on Tuesday and on Saturday went with my photo club to Brookside Gardens to take photos of the many butterflies.  Brookside has a Wings of Fancy exhibit each year and this was my first visit there.  This was a private, planned club outing and the chief advantage was that we were allowed to have tripods.  When the general public visits, no tripods. 

Naturally, I forgot my tripod.  All the below are handheld.  I'm not proud.  I'm less proud to say that I didn't experiment as much as I should - I mostly set my aperture on 4.0 (for the short DOF) and then either let the camera choose the speed (mostly 1/13, 1/15, 1/20) which made for a lot of fuzzy fotos.  A few times I manually set the shutter speed to 1/125 which made for less fuzzy fotos but a little darker.  Like a dunce I should have unleashed the power of the 7D - it has much better high ISO performance. 

I took about 400 photos, of which I felt 60 were not embarrassing.  I put 20 on flickr, and here below enjoy five of them! 

I haven't visited Meadowlark Gardens in nearly a month and hope to go back next weekend. Stay tuned...

ps.  gotta have at least one Monarch here:

Margaret's Garden

I have been hearing about Margaret's Garden in Reston for two years now, at least. I've never sought it out, which was a mistake. Now that I have the new 7D, I decided to go for a drive and find it. Below are some photos taken both on either midday on a Sunday, or, 830 AM one morning before work.

Countdown to Italy! But now, some flowers

Keeping on track with my "every two weeks at Meadowlark".  I'm not so good on keeping on track with the blog.  We all leave for Italy in two weeks.  Here's hoping the volcano gods are appeased during our time away. 

These photos were taken a week ago.  Enjoy!