A new lens!

I just purchased a new lens! 
I am not a gear-head at all.  I still have my first camera and it is my only camera (besides a point-and-shoot that I purchased for $3.00 at the local thrift store).  I've just purchased a new lens to replace the kit lens that came with the camera four years ago.  I'm trying to remember Percy W. Harris' words "Skill in photography is acquired by practise and not by purchase", but oh - it is fun to be outdoors with my new toy!  These are a few shots from my first walk with it around my yard.

Looking down

Looking down is usually considered a bad thing.  Charlie Chaplin said, "You'll never find a rainbow looking down".  That's true, but I find a really interesting world down there, under my feet.

 

Into the mist

"For how can we know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without the cold to give it sweetness?"

John Steinbeck

 

 

 

Walking in Fall

A restful spot

Is not this a true autumn day?  Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonize.  The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallide hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit."

George Eliot

Mushroom or Toadstool?

I don't know whether this was a mushroom or toadstool, but it looked like a fried egg to me.

The last of the leaves

"Even if something is left undone, everyone must take time to sit still and watch the leaves turn."

                  Elizabeth Lawrence

Shadows

 

"Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides."

Junichiro Tanizaki

Scarlet Leaves

"Magnificent Autumn!  He comes not like a pilgrim, clad in russet weeds.  He comes not like a hermit clad in gray.  But he comes like a warrior, with the stain of blood upon his brazen mail."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow