I'm not going to count this picture as another flower close-up.  I'm going to call it an experiment with light.  I bracketed (the general technique of taking several shots of the same subject using different camera settings) this scene to see what affect the size of the aperture of the lens would have on the opacity of the central character.  The Sun was so intense it didn't matter how small or large the opening, the petals of the flower were glowing.  About the only change that I saw, after investigating the various shots, was that the dark regions were darker.  The exposure pictured here is with the aperture of the lens shut all the way down to its largest f-stop number (the focal length divided by the "effective" aperture diameter).  I've been trying to adjust the depth of field (the portion of a scene that appears acceptably sharp in the image) so that more of the background is in focus.  I want some of my pictures to show the distant subject as important as the foreground and one way to do that is to present the background in focus.  In two days I will start the sixth month of my journey and I decided to get a little more technical with my pictures.  That will mean taking even more shots than I already take (today's count was 179) and then matching camera settings with exposure/depth of field effects.  Thank you (both of you) for visiting my daily journal and I know that it can be as interesting as watch paint dry; or flowers blooming.  How will you hold yourself to a higher standard?