For the beginning of October, here's Sunny, our younger cat. Leo's new portrait will follow, closer (because of his color) to Halloween.     CLICK ON IMAGE -->

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He's looking out the kitchen window.  I took this picture from as far away as I could get and still be in the house, to see how my newest lens works.  (It's a Tamron 200-500-mm zoom, for wildlife.)

In PSP, all I did was clone in some screen on the right side (not a good job, but this was to test the lens) where a piece of wall and a thermometer were, crop it, and use PSP's Sharpen More.

What a lovely cat!!!!
and your new lens certainly does him justice, especially his whiskers.

Great photo spider.

Tazz

Thanks, Tazz.  His disposition and intelligence match his good looks.

Terrific resolution. I usually look at the highlights in the eyes to evaluate sharpness - this is great. Nice tight composition.

I call this one "Lady in Green" because she is a mallard hen. CLICK ON IMAGE -->

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This one was taken with my new lens.  It did require some PSP work:  I copied and pasted-on-a-new-layer the green out-of-focus background (it's the lake) and used that to cover a part of a large goose and a black rock and another black thing by blending the new layer with a hardness=0 eraser brush.  Then I cropped the photo to exclude other background and even her lower parts. Then I made some vector blades-of-grass for the lower left corner (the rock was unpleasant, and the green on the duck is from some real out-of-focus blades of grass), converted them to raster, blurred them with a radius of 30.  Then I did some little adjustments to the very bright front feathers to get them less contrasty and less bright.  Then I resized and sharpened with Gentle Edge Mask.  I find these mallard hens really pretty.

      CREATION UNFINISHED

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Glass Mountain, a relatively small volcano (elev 7600 ft) on the east edge of the monster Medicine Lake Volcano in northern California.  Its name comes from the black obsidian you can see interleaved with other lava in the foreground.  It is not even a thousand years old.  The only life forms are the pine trees in the distance, which apparently can manage on sunlight and water from snowmelt, and a very few patches of green lichen, actually fewer than the pines.  There are no grasses, no moss, no soil.  Very eerie.  There were 6 inches of snow in some shady spots 2 weeks ago, but now there must be three times that; winter is just beginning up there, and it won't be over till late in June.

A very nice photo and most interesting.  Some of the rocks in the foreground have the appearance of petrified wood.

Thanks, M T.

Dee this is a great looking photo. Great shot !  

Thanks, Becky.

Both of these photos are very good. Obsidian is difficult and a bit pricy to find in gemstones. I use it whenever it is available.

I guess that's why there's a "no rock-picking" sign at the start of the trail, and also why people have evidently stolen all that was loose or in sight.

Makes sense.