I love my new set up. It is so easy to take photos, plug the camera into the Mac, download and edit the photos, upload to Flickr or our server, and post to my blogs from anywhere where I can get a wireless connection. Very cool!

An early morning walk with the dogs and Ron this morning provided a perfect opportunity for taking some photos of the gardens. I selected some of the best shots to share below. There are many more on my Flickr page, and the full sized jpegs are there as well if you want to see the large, detailed versions of them. I think the close up below of the Grand Primo narcissus is my favorite of the bunch.

Close Up of Narcissus

This Indian paintbrush is also a nice shot.

Indian Paintbrush

Every year we seed wildflowers along our driveway. There are several nice stands of bluebonnets, daisies, and coreopsis finally starting to get established.

Wildflowers Along the Driveway

Click here to see the slideshow of the whole set. You will see the bluebonnets, paint brushes, and other native Texas wildflowers that are growing in the wildflower area on the north side of our land. There is also a picture of my dog Duffer – a very large golden-lab mix. There are close up shots of an Indian paintbrush, our new red passionvine, the Grand Primo narcissus, and a Mexican buckeye bloom spike. There is a feeble attempt at catching a hummingbird at the hummingbird feeder, and a shot of the water lilly in our stock tank water garden. Finally, there are some views of the new garden beds in our front courtyard area featuring the rock garden area, the new copper canyon daisies grouped around a boulder, a shot of my larkspurs, the Mexican buckeye, and a couple of others.

I am using this post as a test of the Flickr blog function. I am hoping it will speed up writing posts that use a simple, standard, photo and text layout.

It seems to work quite well, and really simple to set up. You simply configure Flickr to see your blog/s, select a layout for your post (they provide a nice little app for choosing and testing your layouts), then go to the photo that you want to embed in your post. Select the ‘Blog This’ option, (if you set up more than one blog you get a drop-down menu where you can select which blog you wish to post to), and you are presented with a simple interface for creating your post. When you are done, you simply click the Post entry button and your post is posted to your blog using the format that you preselected.