Currently experimenting with medium distance and closeups (not quite macros) with my cellphone. For more detailed pix, I'm using the Big Camera, currently a Canon PowerShot SX40 HS.

I take lots of quick shots while traveling. Lots of car blur.

Back on Christmas 2008 I started using a Canon PowerShot A650 IS. I find I prefer ambient light, often near sunset, and I use the macro settings a lot. I will put a piece of translucent plastic or a tissue over the flash as a diffuser. I should also use a tripod more often than I have been!

RE: these shots, most of my early pix posted here were taken with a Canon Sure Shot and reduced with The Gimp software from about its original 23" format to 9 ", on the longest side. Email me if you need information about any shot, or where it was taken, or to use any given picture in its original large format. I rarely check yahoo email, so try this one instead: gladney.heather7@gmail.com

As for me, I like weird rock formations and unusual ecosystems. I have a lot of pix of rocks, I must say.

I write sf & f, so I know that reality out-weirds ordinary imagination nearly any day of the week. For example, check out the Wikipedia entry for "red rain," as in Peter Gabriel's song of that title

I am a gardener with more ability to grow exotics in odd soil mixes than to raise downhome veggies in the various clay backyard soils I have worked so far. I do grow some tall roses in it, though. Growing bonsai has only increased my taste for snow, ice, very large pointy trees, mosses, lichens, and rocks.

Doing artwork only increases my respect for those who can convey this amazing world in translations we all understand. Some of the most exciting art I've ever seen has been illuminated by acute observation of the real world--the light coming through a bird's wings, or the fall of shadow delineating faults in a rock face.