The blossoms are dropping off the rhododendron. Most are wilted, but this perfect bloom lay next to a stone in the front yard. Accented Edges and Poster Edges together defined the elements in the picture and set the flower apart.

Today, we celebrated our younger daughter's 17th birthday. Our older daughter brought over her two boys. This is Craig, the little dude. Using Dark Strokes with Pencil Sketch smoothed over some of the rough spots to give us a view of the solemnity of infancy.

My AeroGarden at work now hosts marigolds, geranium and monkey-flower. This is a shot of the marigolds. Here's where I'm learning from all of you. I would have made this a neatly centered subject with a nice area of greenery around it. But you've shown me how effective it can be to put it off-center and to crop it tightly.

It's always interesting to see which pictures work well with filters and which don't. To my surprise, this one just take to filters. With nearly all of them, I liked the original better. In the end, I combined Smudge Stick, Poster Edges and Posterize to get a rather more dramatic version.

I really like this portrait of my grandson, Aidan, with our younger daughter, his beloved Aunt Sierra. Photocopy at a reduced opacity brightened and sharpened their faces.

This time of year, there's this Fluffy Stuff (that's the official scientific term) that floats around in the air like tiny atmospheric stars and collects in drifts on the ground. The patterns it produced on the edge of the parking lot at work caught my eye. Pencil Sketch at a reduced capacity lets us see all the fibers that make up the drifts.

I came upon this root this afternoon. I loved the cracks and weathering--it almost seems like the prow of a Viking ship to me. Bas Relief with a touch of Sepia tint makes the texture more tactile.

The tender shades of green of late spring are impossible to describe in words. I wanted to play up the colors as well as the patterns of the branches; Crosshatch did this nicely.