Cactus

From Photo of the day (2009)

Left my camera at home this morning as the forecast was for -7 C and I didn't want to leave it in the car at that temperature. The one time I tried bringing it into the goat dairy to keep it a little warmer, it did some very strange things and I lost all the photos I took that day. Now that I get home earlier I figured I could find something in town when I went to return my library books and buy a new comb (my old one now has no less than 7 broken teeth, 5 of which are missing entirely). Anyways - I got most of the way home from town when I realized I hadn't found a photo yet. So I set this one up in front of my sliding window with one of my terrarium residents - the only place in my north facing apartment with any light. I used my new tripod and my wide angle lens (it has a lower available F-stop so I could blur the carpet background better, and my long lens wouldn't focus close enough even when I was standing on tip-toe). The tripod helped with my low shutter speed (lack of light) on the low ISO I used for a clearer picture.
Touched up the saturation, shadows/highlights, cropped and sharpened a bit in Picasa.