Yesterday, my husband and I attended Canyon Colors, an outdoor art show at Gateway Canyons Resort in Unaweep Canyon, about an hour's drive from our home.

Most of the fall color has faded from the high country, but autumn is moving down into the canyons. Cottonwoods, willows, and other riparian trees are turning gold. The oak brush, or scrub oak, locally known as "magic carpet" is blanketing slopes with rich tones of rust, orange, maroon, and even purple. The drive from our home to the resort was spectacular.

I was scheduled to participate in the "Paint the Palisade" plein air event from 12-4 and to teach a children's class from 1:40-2:10. I had spent weeks updating my website and adding pictures of the area to online outlets. I had my flier ready ...

Yesterday, I participated in a studio tour in our town, not as a photographer, but as a painter. Though my work has passed through many phases, I now find the most creative satisfaction through a very personal brand of expressionist abstraction. Because my father was also a painter, heavily influenced by Cezanne, my best photography is also abstract. It is hard to get abstract photographs approved for stock, which is a shame, but I do have a few here, as do others.

Abstract photographs are great backgrounds for text and are useful for adding depth through layering. Their nonspecific subject matter makes them perfect for every design use.

Many interior decorators ...

Both my husband and I were raised in Southern California. Until we moved to western Colorado, we had never experienced four seasons.

September and October are now our favorite times. We explore the beautiful mountains above Paonia, including Kebler Pass

We enjoy long drives on the spectacular Grand Mesa, the world's largest flat-topped mountain.

We also visit Dallas Divide, a beautiful pass above Ridgway in the San Juans.

Autumn's pleasures here include fresh apples, orange pumpkins in the field, corn mazes, golden aspens, racing streams, and cottonwoods reflected in quiet lakes.

I am grateful to Dreamstime for enabling me to share my favorite time of the year and my favorite place.

My favorite model is always handy. He is a good sport. He has a wonderful face and a fantastic sense of humor. Unlike friends and neighbors, he does not balk when he reads model releases.

He looks like a professor, which isn't surprising, because he was a teacher for 25 years. He also looks like a scientist or veteran nauralist, which is good because we like to hike together.

If a major company wants to use his image in a campaign, his agent will never try to sue me. (winks)

He doesn't mind being cast as a senior or a character. He has been proud to be unique for each of his 67 years.

Who is my favorite model? My husband, of course.

Note: I currently use a Nikon D80 with Photoshop CS3 and selective noise reduction with Neat Image.

When I first started shooting digital, I had a point and shoot that produced great jpegs, but I had to accept what the camera gave me.

Most of the time, that was fine, but some shots needed help. I used Photoshop 6 to adjust them, but that created artifacts and other problems.

Graduating to a digital SLR helped in many ways, but the default jpegs still did not offer me sufficient creative control. After reading about Camera Raw, I decided to give it a try and have never looked back.

Now, I open each image in RAW and do most of the adjustments on the initial screen. I can change the white balance, goose the contrast and saturation,...

I hate being rejected. Do you remember the last kid chosen for teams in elementary school? That was always me. Not only was I rejected, but it was in such a public way. So, what did I do? In adulthood, I selected several creative, highly competitive fields of endeavor. What can I say, I'm kind of nuts.

In writing ,painting, and now photography, I deal with rejection every day. It hurts my feelings, and after the hurt comes a flash of anger, but after the fury comes a rush of determination--not "to do better" because that's a matter of opinion (A Wrinkle in Time, a classic, award-winning middle grade novel, was rejected 22 times before being published), but rather ...

A freelance writer, I spend most of the week in my office in front of a computer monitor. I enjoy my work, but I do need to get away from it, sometimes. Fresh air and sunshine are the best medicine for the overworked.

My escape of choice is landscape photography. Following my father's shutterclicks, I started shooting pictures of scenery when I was ten years old. In those days, ISO was 15 and even the brightest sunlight required a steady hand,

Later, my husband and I shot pictures together in Colorado's spectacular San Juan Mountains. Both of us taught elementary school in Los Angeles. We spent our summers in Ouray. I was thrilled when ...