The coneflower that is about-to-be. It’s there, but the petals haven’t fully grown yet.

I love coneflowers and I have plenty of them in the gardens. They are easy to grow, long lasting and, to me, the quintessential flower for a cottage garden.

And they re-seed. What could be better?

Gosh, the landscape around here is such a lush green. Days and days of rain will do that. So, though the rain was a pain in the tush, the payoff is pretty spectacular.

Lawn mowing yesterday. Lawn mowing today. Weed pulling today. Weed pulling yesterday.

Are you getting a picture of my weekend?

Such a tiny little bee. I stood there for several minutes, watching him alight on the stamens, then move further inside the lily, then back to the stamens.

Taking photos of flowers and birds and bees and bugs takes patience. I’m not always the most patient person, indeed, at times, I am unbelievably impatient, but I am patient about photos of flora and fauna. If I had started doing all this earlier in life, I could easily imagine myself as a National Geographic-type photographer, setting up my camera and tripod at some location, then waiting and waiting for the perfect shot. I would love that.

By the way, the single best investment I have made, besides my camera, is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – or simply Lightroom. It goes on sale a couple of times a year and I happened to purchase it at one of those times, encouraged by my friend Dawn of Creative Cain Cabin.

Yes, PicMonkey is free but it doesn’t hold a candle to what Lightroom can do. Not even close. Photoshop has a steep learning curve and is more expensive than Lightroom. That learning curve, along with the cost, often puts people off.  But Lightroom is more affordable and, once you figure it out, easy to use. I can see a distinct difference in the pre-Lightroom and post-Lightroom photos on this blog.

Of course, you still have to know your camera and its settings. You have to be willing to take it off Auto and use it on Manual. But all of that comes with practice.

I use PicMonkey for fonts, but that’s about it. I don’t do a lot of fonts on my photos anyway, it’s not my thing. I did, however, create this watermark in Lightroom.

If you have a blog and are serious about your photos, if you don’t have a blog and are serious about your photos, if you don’t want to invest several hundred dollars in Photoshop but you do want something better than the limitations of a free photo editing application, Lightroom is for you.

This might sound like a commercial, but truly, it comes from the heart. I have thanked Dawn again and again for pointing me in the direction of Lightroom. It’s that good.

Anyway, I’ll try to keep an eye out for the next time Lightroom is on sale, so I can tell you about it.

Boy, do I love this shot.

By the way, dear friends, the new book blog will be up and running tomorrow. Well, it’s actually up and running now, but I’m not going to reveal the name until Monday. I’m excited about it. Of course, it will evolve over time, but the basic underpinnings are there. I worked on it yesterday between bouts of mowing.

I do hope you will like it!

Happy Sunday.