So I've got a shot of a flower the other day and am working on my first photo manipulation.  I haven't really used photo editing software since high school and your forget a lot in 10 years! The rainy (and threatening rainy) days have been conducive to studying and working on the photo, trying different ideas and swapping things around.  Hopefully in the next week I will be done and have something decent to show for it.

Other than that I've been around trying to get some additional shots trying various techniques I've been reading about.  For instance, the cylinders shot in the gallery to play around with black and white.  Now I know this is pretty easy (or it should be) but I must have taken 50 photos in different color ranges to see how they turned out in B&W and manipulating in the software.  Its not the best photo, but its a start to get a feel for the variations of gray and the like....