(All that bare land around the edge of the lake is lake bottom. The lake is low due to drought.)
Lately, I’ve taken a lot of opportunities to sharpen my advanced photography skills. Composition-wise, this photo is nothing special. However, with automatic exposure, my camera was severely underexposing this scene. Therefore, I switched to manual to overexpose it somewhat. Nice colors.

Last Saturday, we went on the Vanishing Texas River Cruise. I took a bunch of photos of seagulls as kids fed them off the back of the boat. It was a crisp clear winter day which provided a nice background. Since there was harsh sunlight, I was expecting the gulls to be heavily shadowed. However, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the reflection off the lake lighted them quite well from below.

This weekend we celebrated my mother-in-law’s 79th birthday at Lake Buchanan. On Saturday, we all went on the Vanishing Texas River Cruise, and then we spent the night at the lodge at Canyon of the Eagles. We had a really good time. (You can see all our photos from the weekend here)
As we walked around the Canyon of the Eagles park, we discovered that it was lousy with armadillos. I lost count at ten. For years, I’ve regaled the kids with stories of my childhood armadillo chasing and catching. This weekend was my first opportunity in over 25 years to relive those good times. To my surprise, it was much easier to catch an armadillo than I remembered.
Here’s the first one that I caught. It was a young one:

Samuel would not get near the first one that I caught; but he was willing to hold the second one. By the time we went hiking on Sunday morning, he was ready to try to catch one for himself. Fortunately, he got the chance. Here he is with his catch:

He’s very proud of his accomplishment; he asked me to print out this photo so he could take it to school on Monday.