This morning, on the way to work, I listenned to a story on National public Radio about old turtle in Hoan Kiem lake in Hanoi. It is very interesting and it also reminds me of my Vietnamese heritage. With more than 4000 years of history, Vietnam has very rich culture that I need to explore more when I retire. You can listen to this story on the NPR site.
Back to my FlowerPictures site, I want to tell you a litle bit about the camera lens that I used to take pictures of flowers. I use a SIGMA 105 mm Macro lens with my SLR Nikon. Taking pictures of flowers likes taking a portrait of people, I need a good telephoto lens to prevent the distortion of the picture when taking picture to close to the camera. For flowers, especially the very small one, I need a macro lens that I can take closeup pictures. With tele-macro lens, I took beautiful closeup pictures of flowers that look naturally and stand out from the blur background without manipulating by Photoshop! The SIGMA 105 mm Macro lens is more expensive than my old Nikon SLR! Because of this lens, I decided to buy the SLR digital Nikon (D70) so I can use this lens with my new digital camera.

I'm a babyboomer and I'm going to retire this year!!!! I'll have a new beginning. Exciting time!
After more than 30 years working, it's time for me to relax and enjoy life before it's too late!
I'm a scientist, but I have a passion in gardenning, especially flower-garden, and photography. I have a small greenhouse attaching to my house to keep my troipcal plants from freezing winter in St. Louis, Missouri. Around 1999, my epiphyllum flowers were so beautiful and I want to take their pictures to keep. I have a Nikon film camera that I used mostly to take pictures of flowers! The flower pictures are so beautiful, and I want to keep for myself, so the next thing is to publish them on the web. I first published them in some free web servers, moving around many time, and finally, I decided to register a name and placed it in a pay server. A free website is born! It is www.flowerpictures.net . The number of flower pictures keep growing, and my website is very popular now. If you search for flower pictures in Google, my site is at the top of the search list! All pictures in my site are free for personal use, and I want to keep that way.
Beside flower pictures, I've been taken many pictures of scenery, animals, people... and any thing that beautiful to me. Therefore, I added a new site to display these pictures, it is www.freebeautifulpictures.com . This site is part of my old flower pictures site. I hope you enjoy them.