These days, most of my photography is done with a Kodak EasyShare P712.  Nice super-zoom, excellent land-and-city scape and flower camera.  Shutter speed? Not so much. Still, once in a while, if you stand in a garden full of butterflies and point the camera at a particular flower, and wait... and wait... nice things happen.

Water lilies: members of the family nymphaeales, shown by DNA testing to be one of the oldest flowering plant lineages in existence. Common in many garden ponds, they range from dwarf varieties to the giant Victoria, with leaves 15 ft in diameter (they used to pose babies on the leaves to show how strong they were).This was my very first water lily photo, taken in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco:



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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.