Pennsylvania Autumn

A Maple on Fire

The leaves are quickly finding their way off of the trees and to the ground so I figured it was high time I posted some pictures of the glorious fall colors. Most of these were taken just a day or two ago. For more fall photos taken a week or so ago, you can check out my fall color post on my garden blog. And if you still need to see more leaves, go to Dave's Garden Blogger Fall Color Project, where he has compiled a collection of fall color posts from bloggers around the world.

I just love this photo, maybe it's the framing of it.

I think the red of the maple against the chartreuse of the lilacs just pops!

Most of the yellows of the Silver Maple are already down.

A New Toy!

My new camera arrived late last week and I am finally having a chance to post some of my first shots. I chose the Nikon D60 with 18-55 mm AF-S VR and 55-200mm AF-S VR Nikkor lenses. So far I have only used the 18-55 mm lens but it's great! It doesn't have a macro lens but it does have a closeup mode which seems to work just a well (at least for my purposes). I was also experimenting with portrait mode.

Lillian has met a new friend.

This rose bud (above) was taken in the closeup mode.

This rose bud was taken in the portrait mode. There is a slight difference in the blurring of the background, but it's not that different.

I Found It!

On Saturday, we finally got to do something we had been planning for a long, long time. We went geocaching. And it was so much fun, I feel myself being instantly obsessed with and addicted to it. If you are not familiar with it, geocaching is where you are looking for a cache (small to large size container) which is hidden (usually a wooded area), using the GPS coordinates. Once you find the cache, there is usually a log to sign and there may be little treasures to swap. You don't need a big, fancy GPS device either. We just have a little handheld unit, nothing like the navigation systems that are so popular today. It just needs to give you the coordinates.

We had a lot of errands to run on Saturday, so we thought we would stick something fun in the middle of it to break up the day. We went to North Park and had time to look for two caches. The first brought us by an old fountain. It was so beautiful there, with ferns and mosses everywhere. John found the first hidden cache. It was a micro-cache with just a log, so we signed it and re-hid it. Here are some pictures from the first find.

"I found it!"

Well Hidden

Lots of ferns

The Fountain of Youth

Now we're ready for our next one. We head over to the swimming pool parking area and start looking. We head back on a nice trail, we're at the right coordinates, and after some searching - We found it. This was a much larger container with a log book and all sorts of neat things to swap. So we left a little stretchy frog toy and took a Nemo light toy. After this find we had to continue on our way, but we're already planning our next adventure. Here are some more pictures.

"We found it !"

"What's this doing here ?!"

Butterflies

As I went to put some mail in the mailbox the other day, I noticed this butterfly on one of the trees down there and since I had the camera with me, I was able to get some photos. This reminded me of some butterfly photos I took at the beach in North Carolina a couple of years ago. Both times the butterfly stuck around for a while, although both times they kept changing position and both times it was hard to get just the right shot with the digital camera.

Here are my results.

These are from North Carolina in September 2006.



And these are from Pennsylvania in June 2008.