Just a dandy lion

The past few mornings have brought temperatures below freezing and, as I hinted before, the little flowers that were still blooming out in the vineyard are dying back now. They're almost as beautiful in death as they were in life.

Not a dandelion but a flower from the same family. This one got frozen just as it was about to open.

Susan reminded me (thanks!) that I have a mono-pod (as opposed to a tripod) for the camera, so I took it out with me on Tuesday morning's sunrise walk. It helped me keep steady in the low light and my pictures are better. I'm still having problems with the focus in macro (close up) mode. My camera's manual focus doesn't function all that well. First off, it's electronic and not truly manual and the buttons are a pain to manipulate, especially when I'm wearing gloves in below-freezing temperatures. Second, the range of focus is very limited so I'm often not pleased with the result.

This is the same photo, just cropped differently.

The other issue is that the automatic focus has a handful of options that go from a wide general focus to a point focus, with several in-between settings. Navigating the menus to change that for each image is hard enough to do without gloves. As a result, I often end up with depth-of-field problems: a photo where the background is crisp and clear and my subject is blurry, or a portion of the subject is in focus while another portion is not.

This is one of the reasons I want to upgrade to a reflex camera with lenses I can manipulate manually, like I used to do with my film camera.