I should say right at the outset -- I am a cliche, a walking, picture-taking cliche: I love flowers.   I love meandering through botanical gardens, aiming the camera at whatever burst of color catches my eye.  I like snooping through friends' backyards, watching out for pretty weeds. I am the sort of person who, when visiting a wonderful old mansion, keeps one eye out the window, trying to figure out what's the best angle to photograph that flowering crabapple by the pond. I am an utterly hopeless case: a flower fiend and proud of it.

This is one of my earliest flower photos.  I was walking down Edinburgh's High Street when I saw these fist-sized pom-poms at a flowerseller's stall.  It was my first encounter with the giant thistle -- at least that's what the sign said they were. To follow up one confession with another, I am also utterly hopeless at keeping track of names; genus, species, that sort of thing.  To me, it's all about color and shape.

 

This is my favorite place in the whole world: An t-Eilean Sgitheanach, the Winged Isle, Eilean a' Cheò, the Isle of Mists, Skye. The largest of the Inner Hebrides, where the forbidding Black Cuillin wait patiently for the unwary or reckless climber and the softer, gentler Red Cuillin with the perfect cone of Glamaig at one end cast shadows on the surrounding lochans. It's a place of austere, spare beauty, like most of the Highlands, but there is a special magic here, something to do with light and shade and mist.




This is one of my favorite places in Skye: the old stone bridge near the Slighachan hotel, looking towards the Red Hills. On the left, the mountain with the sharp bump is Marsco: God says if I take a good enough picture of it, He'll give it to me.