the end of fall

i really missed the opportunity to shoot any photos of our gorgeous minnesota fall. most of the leaves are off the trees now. but as sunday was such a lovely, warm day, i set out in the afternoon to do a little photo practice on manual mode. i gave myself the assignment of finding color amidst all the dead, brownness of pre-winter. here's what i came up with.

[something with vivid red leaves growing in the middle of our rocks? yes, we have purple rocks. maybe the former owners were vikings fans? who knows.]

[our neighbor offered to paint our storage shed for us this summer. i think he was sick of looking at it in its previous state. we chose this bright blue.]

[a tree in our front yard—no idea what kind of tree it is. i was flat on my back taking this shot up at the tree and ben came out the front door to ask if i was okay.]

i'm loving the camera. oh—also, ben downloaded trials of both adobe's lightroom and apple's aperture for me to try. i know a lot of people like lightroom, but i wasn't impressed by it—probably because i don't know how to use it properly. :) aperture, however, blows my mind. i used it to edit these three shots. i had been using iphoto, so using another apple program was pretty easy to understand. just my two cents for those interested in photo stuff!