Hi everyone! Sorry for my absence all week. It’s been an eventful week, and not in a great way. The biggest issue has been dealing with my internet service. I frequently write about the joys of country living, but good internet is not one of those joys. After many calls to various tech support people the conclusion is that my router is on it’s death bed. Another one has been ordered, but it won’t be here for at least another week, perhaps longer, so I’m going to do what I can with this old, and very erratic one. Some days it gives me a decent signal and other days there is no signal at all. Most of the time it come on and goes off erratically. One afternoon, after leaving work quite late, I was almost home when I ran into a car wreck that blocked the road, so to get home I had to go around it on the back roads. When I did finally make it home there was no power (another one of those things that isn’t always great about country living). The power didn’t come back on until after 10 pm (I think they had to cut the power due to the wreck. That area is all scorched and has that burnt electrical smell). All of this has taken place during a very busy work week and I have been trying to fight off a virus and two migraine headaches. Between long tech support calls, no power, and erratic internet I have written a couple of posts, but been unable to publish them. Tonight the internet seems to be working most of the time, so I’m going to try again to publish. Below is a post I wrote earlier this week.

I’m not sure how other photographers deal with their images, but I don’t like to throw much away. If something is completely out of focus or a total miss, I sometimes trash them, but not always. As I have gotren better at post processing, I have found uses for some of those ”mistake” images. Some of those total misses actually make nice backgrounds for some of my Photoshop compositions and out of focus shots sometimes hold artistic value, too. Often, I can see value in an “imperfect” image when I come back to it later after not having looked at it in awhile. This completely out of focus, near miss of an Eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly is definitely one of those shots that I should probably have trashed, but there was something about the way the colors blend and the way the movement makes the rear wings look almost look like feathers that has always appealed to me. I took this photo back in 2020 when I was just getting really started in nature photography and felt like every image needed to be ”perfect” in order to be publishable (and now I look at many of those shots and see so many imperfections!). On this photo, I did some cropping and some enhancement of the colors, and came up with the above artistic image that I actually feel comfortable publishing, not as a perfect shot, but as something with some artistic appeal.