Thistles

Today might not be the best day for thistle pictures (as the thistle is the symbol of Scotland), but I find these to be fascinating plants.

This picture to the right is a seriously cropped section of the reduced picture below. I was playing with my photo-editing software. I will admit that most of my pictures are cropped, though a few are only resized (for uploading). I have found that the program will also do a good job of adjusting brightness and contrast. I use the clone tool to remove the spots on my sensor that show up on many of the bird pictures. That's about all the editing I do.