I went out in the cold rain the other day and took about 50 photos, mostly of crabapple tree blooms ready to burst. But in my back yard I was struck by the wet aspen leaves stuck together and backlit by the sky. This is one of the last photos I took but it's the one I ended up liking most.
I offer both a color version and a black and white version. Take your pick between the "reality" of green tree leaves or the texture, lines and light that make up the "bones" of the photo.
Canon 5DIII 1/60s f/7.1 ISO200 168mm
I took several photos of my wife's pink tulips. One was posted yesterday, as you may have noticed. And today I post another version. This one adopts an unusual point of view and but I remove the color. There is something a bit perverse about taking color away from a scene but black and white photographs require/allow us to see things that may be lost in the color versions. Anyway, this one has a bit of a eerie feel to it, if you ask me. But for now, I kind of like it.
I am hung up on flowers, obviously. And I am also once again compelled to comment on the power of the photographer's point of view. The conventional view of flower is from the side and from a short distance. The tulip becomes something quite different when you view it from the top at close range.
Well, here they are: my neighbor's purples tulips Water droplets from morning dew or from a spray bottle? I'll never tell.
My wife has nice flowers but does our neighbor and the other day I couldn't help but be drawn to her collection of yellow tulips, which had just bloomed. The light was poor but I enhanced the scene with on-camera flash. I rarely use flash but I have taught my students that it's ok to use flash as long as it doesn't overpower the scene. In the case of this photo, I think it works.
I call this post "Finally!" because after what seems like and endless winter and cold spring, it finally feels like summer. And my wife's daffodils are celebrating the occasion by blooming.
With one exception, these 13 people receiving their diplomas from Lake Area Technical Institute president Deb Shephard, are graduates of the BSA Photo/Media program at LATI. It is the second group of graduates from the program I started two years ago and the last group at Lake Area that I will call "mine."
On the last day of my 34 years of teaching at WHS, I snapped a photo of my 1st block world history class. 
It is a fact known to my family, friends and associates. But I haven't in any formal or public way made the announcement: after 36 1/2 years of being a classroom teacher, I am retiring. I am down to my last three days with "my" students in "my" classroom.
Of course, this view of the distant Los Angeles skyline, taken from the Hollywood Bowl overlook just off of Mulholland Drive, isn't alien to the denizens of LA. But to a flatlander in a relatively rural state (with little or no air pollution) this landscape is certainly foreign.