We spent five incredible days in Giverny, France, the home of Monet's Garden. Giverny is a small village located 80 km. west of Paris. It has a few bed & breakfasts, galleries and restaurants. There are, however, no drug stores, grocery stores or commercial enterprises. Tha main attraction to this quaint village is Claude Monet's home and garden and museums dedicated to Monet and Impressionism. Our photography group, led by Charles Needle, was fortunate to have access to the gardens in the early morning hours and again in the late afternoon and evening hours when the grounds were closed...

 We bought a new macro lens fro our trip to Europe so we could both experiment with taking close-ups of the exquisite flowers. Charles taught us a lot about macro photography but what I learned the most was that it takes great patience! Ordinarily I pride myself on having patience but when it comes to taking pictures, I am challenged. I found it frustrating to be surrounded by such beauty and unable to record it as well and as fast as I would like. It took time to set the tripod up just so, angle the camera, decide what part of the flower to focus on, focus manually, add a light source, compose...

We spent this weekend in Franconia, New Hampshire with the Plymouth Digital Photography Meetup group in anticipation of taking photographs of the Lupine Festival. Unfortunately, we didn't get too many pictures because of rainy weather, but we did have a lovely time.The stately blue, purple, pink, and white lupines stood tall and beautiful against the backdrop of the mountains. I was reminded of the children's book "Miss Rumphius" which we used to read to our children. In the book, Miss Rumphius sets out to reach two goals in her life and her grandfather challenges her to reach a third: to make...