I got a new com­put­er more than a year ago. I’d added soft­ware to the old com­put­er to down­load pic­tures from my cam­era. No prob­lem, I’d just shove that disc in the new omput­er to trans­fer the soft­ware. Except—it did­n’t work with Win­dows 7. Who knew that would have been a prob­lem? But, some day, I’d fig­ure it out. Sure I would.

But I didn’t.

I resist­ed tak­ing pic­tures. Hey, I could down­load any that friends or fam­i­ly e‑mailed me. The big snow we had last win­ter? Well, I did take some pic­ture of that, but they sat on my camera.

Final­ly, I bought a new pro­gram, high­ly rat­ed, in fact, num­ber one for 2015. Geez, why did I do that? I have no idea how to use it. That takes study, time spent away from writ­ing. But…

Hey, I’ll try down­load­ing my cam­era. Shoot a few more images. I walked out my back door (since our house is on a hill, the porch is more of a bal­cony) and stand with my head prac­ti­cal­ly in the trees. It’s one of my favorite places, with one of my favorite views. (I won­der, was I a bird in some past life?)

Now, to prove I’ve mas­tered the first basic les­son of my new soft­ware, I’ll dis­play one of the pic­tures right here.

And now, to illus­trate how long those pic­tures have been in the cam­era, I’ll show an ear­li­er pho­to tak­en from near­ly the same spot. See those bare branch­es on the right? That’s the same tulip poplar tree shown above.

So that’s my lat­est new soft­ware. I’m hop­ing to do won­der­ful things, even­tu­al­ly, with my pic­tures. I’m a cam­era buff from way back. Just don’t ask me any­thing about cell phones that only inci­den­tal­ly make tele­phone calls.