Mystery revealed

The answer to the first mystery photo is snowflakes on my dog's back. Here is the original photo. I cropped it to the out-of-focus section in the upper left, which I thought made an interesting pattern, and was suitably mysterious. Sometimes throwing subjects way out of focus intentionally can be a useful artistic device.

Also, this rather boring original photo shows you that you can often find a hidden gem even in a throw-away shot, so don't throw any of them away until you've given them a closer look. When I first got my digital camera, I used to delete bad shots right on my camera as soon as I took them. But I read somewhere someone's philosophy that the record of digital photos you've taken should be no different than the strips of negatives we used to keep all of, even if only a few of the shots were worth printing. With a 1.5 terabyte hard disk, and cheap optical archival media (double-sided DVDs), I have no need to weed. So now I keep virtually all of my original digital images. I'll only ditch the really bad mistakes (e.g., a lovely picture of the inside of my lens cap) when there's obviously no material for mining of art.