Nice pictures of the flowers, but did you notice they all had bugs on them? Seriously great pic's.

Everything in Florida has bugs on it! I remember in high school my biology teacher saying that in Florida clean houses have clean bugs.

Tony, if I had to bring a knife to a gator fight, the #12-9-14 would be a great choice. The only problem is it might slow me down when I'm running for my life!

Stinging Nettle

Personally, I think this plant is worse than poison ivy.

Damselflies fold their wings over their bodies when perched and dragonflies keep them perpendicular to their bodies.

The first two pics are Ebony Jewelwing damselflies. The females have white spots on their wingtips. The male was slowly opening and closing its wings and I got a partially open pic.

The third pic is a Pondhawk dragonfly.

Rick,
What kind of camera and lens are you using for these great shots?

Rick
Great shots. It is nice to see photos from a place that I haven't been

Peter

For a long time I was using a Canon SD1200, but now I have a Canon SX130. With its 12x zoom and 12.1 MP I can get close enough to most subjects and then crop and enlarge the photo later.

The camera has a lot of features that I haven't yet learned to use. Mostly I just leave it on Auto for everything. The worst thing about these little cameras is the auto focus feature. Frequently I just can NOT get it to focus where I want it to focus. It is so aggravating! I lose a lot of good shots that way.

But overall, for an inexpensive and compact camera to carry while hiking I think this Canon is pretty good.

The photo editing site I was using, Picnik, became a part of Google Plus and is now closed to the public, so now I use PicMonkey. I don't like it as much as Picnik so far, but it's free so I can't complain.

Here's an example of a shot blown by the auto focus.

Thanks, Peter! That's one of the things that I like so much about your photos too.

While I'm on the subject, here's another blown shot that still bothers me. I had to lay flat on my belly and let this rat snake crawl right up to my face to get this shot, but noooooo...the camera focused somewhere in the background. The snake didn't give me a second chance.

Rick,
Your camera gets a pretty good review on cnet. Especially good for creative control.
Have you tried partially holding down the shutter button to lock in the focus?
Then pressing again to take the shot?
Tony