photographing flowers

Today my classmates and I went to Hampton Court to tour the palace once owned by King Henry VIII.  The palace was beautiful with tapestries and paintings everywhere.  There were also expansive gardens surrounding the palace.  In these gardens, our task was to photograph flowers as a way to learn how to use the macro setting on our cameras.  However, the sky was very overcast and threatening to rain all day long so a lot of the flowers weren't open and it was hard to photograph some, the red (and prettiest) ones in particular.  There was a maze on the grounds that Elana tried out...and failed at.  We did however, shoot a rather funny video about our experience in the maze.  I may post this later with Elana's permission, of course.  Anyway, the grounds and gardens were very beautiful but I am going to be rather narcissistic and post a picture of myself for this blog entry:

Purty, huh?  Yeah, we started to get artsy-fartsy after a while.  If you would like to see more pictures - from today and last week - you can click on the link to my photo album on the left-hand side of this page.  Yeah, I finally got around to posting them all after slacking for a week. 

Later this week, Elana and I are planning on going on the Jack the Ripper murders tour.  We considered going today but the weather made a nap look far more appealing.