especially with the lights flashing.

Just a cruisin’ - Arkansas State Trooper Cruiser at Russellville, Arkansas, Downtown Fall Festival, October 27, 2007

Arches National Park, September 24, 2007
12:03 P.M.; 1/350; f/6.7; 18mm; no flash;

Bronze Big Horn Sheep at Arches National Park Visitors Center

September 25, 2007 9:52 A.M.;
Aperture: f/8
Focal Length: 40 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Focal Length In 35mm Film: 60

September 27, 2007; This photo was from the last campground of our August - September trip.

I’ve stopped publishing Mike’s Photo Blog. Instead, my photo-blogging will be here on Exit78. I’ll be leaving the photo blog in place for now (perhaps I’ll resume it at some future time) so that any links from other sites pointing to it will not be broken. Photos previously posted on Mike’s Photo Blog may also appear here.

Generally, I will be selecting random photos for publication and will post new images a few times a week, interspersed with my other posts.

The photograph above was taken in August in South Dakota’s Custer State Park. The haze was from wild fires in states north and west of us and made for a very smoky day, though we saw worse days later in the trip.

Our last partial day in Wisconsin was also the first “official” day of Winter.

Before we left, we went, with our daughter, son-in-law and grandkids, to the Adolph C. and Eugenie Mayer Bolz Conservatory, which is in the Orbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison.

It was a really interesting place and I’ll be posting more of the photos that I took there on my photo blog over time.

I posted all of the photos from the Conservatory on Flickr yesterday. Shortly after I posted, I received an invitation to add the photo on the right to a group called First Day of Winter 2007, which, of course, I did. As of right now, there are 187 pictures from many different countries around the world.

The conservatory is an interesting place to visit. Of course, I was trying to get good photos and the light is kind of tricky sometimes inside. It was a cloudy, foggy kind of day, which meant that it was darker than normal inside and I was trying to shoot without using flash. I was successful at getting a few good images, though I think I may have resorted to flash on some of them.

Of course, concentrating on the photos, I was lagging behind everyone else. Karen and our daughter talked about the weather and the suggestion was made that we leave early to avoid the storm predicted for the next day, which I had thought a little bit about, and we ended up doing: see We got FED UP and LEFT Wisconsin EARLY!

Can you remember having fun like these boys? I can!

Wishing all of you Happy Holidays! and many merry, happy memories!

We made it here yesterday afternoon. This is the scene from our window this morning. There’s more snow here than I’ve seen in a long, long time.

We staying in a small town near Madison, Wisconsin, visiting our daughter, her husband and our grandkids.

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Happy Holidays from Exit 78

I’m continuing to learn a bit in MS Expression Web. The little “Christmas card” above was created completely without the use of tables… and that’s quite an accomplishment for me. It uses in-line styles. I don’t quite understand it yet, but I can learn.

I’ve also added an option with the comments so that the few who comment here can subscribe to see what my reply is, if they so desire, and what others after them have said. I generally subscribe to comments when commenting on other blogs and this has been on my to-do list for quite a while.

Yesterday, I downloaded Expression Web, Microsoft’s replacement for FrontPage. After getting past a few exasperating points, I was able to start doing a few things that I’ve never been able to do with any of the web page programs that I’ve ever had. A quick example is overlapping of images in a web page or in a format that I could use in a blog post. This was put together in less than 10 minutes with no typing in of code, just cut and paste, drag and drop.

Don’t get me wrong. A little bit of html knowledge was required as the pasting of images was done into the “img” tag in “code view.”

I’ve got a lot to learn before I can use it “fluently.” But it has a lot more possibilities, I think, than FrontPage and I will very probably be upgrading from FrontPage before the end of the 60 day trial period.