I wrote in an earlier blog that The Badlands of South Dakota is my favorite landscape destination.  I should explain.  I do find the red rock country of the southwest more spectacular and would likely head there first if given the chance.  I also have a love affair with the high mountains of the west.  As a child the badlands were my introduction to the western landscape.  I have been there many, many times and I have worked it with a camera more times than any location.  I have found it to be the most diverse “rock park” and I have been able to create the most unusual and varied ways to look at a western location at here, than any place else.  So it is diversity, sentimentality and the amount of time spent there that makes this my favorite landscape place.In a recent post I told the story of a small mammal called the Pika, and shared a picture of it with a mouth full of vegetation.  The image below is just another of that same critter.

In my own homeland of the Upper Midwest, without a doubt, the Thirteen-lined Ground Squirrel is my favorite small mammal.  They can also be found in the eastern and western U.S.  These little fellows have provided me with hours of entertainment and thousands of pictures.  In the piece I wrote about Illinois Beach State Park, I was remiss in mentioning that I Beach  North is where I get most of my ground squirrel photos.

Many sorts of shorebirds, like the Least Sandpiper shown below, love to rummage around on stone covered beaches to hunt for invertebrates.  It is amazing how camouflaged they are.  You are usually about to step on them before they are noticed.

An even better example of camo is this Eastern Screech Owl nesting in a tree cavity.

I am forever fascinated by natural rock formations.  Certainly wind and water sculpted sandstone arches are among the most interesting.  Arches N.P. in Utah has the largest number of those formations in North America.

Any of you who out there who have viewed a fair amount of my imagery, know that I like to photograph crepuscular rays.  Also called God Beams.  I am always watching for that correct combination of sun and clouds.  This phenomenon can change an ordinary scene into an interesting one. This late morning shot was made as a storm blew over Lake Michigan.

The autumn images that I have displayed on this blog over the past several weeks all have one thing in common.   The compositions within those pictures were all very deliberate.  Win, lose or draw they were the result of my thoughtful (hopefully) decisions.  Whether they were made of an entire forest, a single tree, or they were an abstraction of color and shape, there was an effort by me to simplify.  As usual I stayed away from symmetry in those pix.  The morning that I went out and made the picture below, my performance as a photographer was conducted via a philosophy that was 180 degrees from my norm.  Every image I made that day was created using the very first composition that I saw.  Whatever I saw when I first spotted the scene, was kept as exact to that view as humanly possible.  I often give myself little assignments like that.  Make images a variety of subjects using only one focal length.  Photograph only one subject with every focal length I own.  These exercises keep me looking at subjects in new and fresh ways.  The image below turned out to be sort of a semi-abstract.

As always I appreciate your company while I ramble on,

Wayne