I woke this morning and something was different.  There were no major opinions swimming around in my mind.  Not art, not politics, not cell phones.  My brain seemed to bleed it all out over night.  Good for me and even better for you.  Still the thoughts about nature and photography never leave me no matter how empty my brain gets.  Let’s make today just about the joy of  that subject.

Water appears in almost everyone’s pictures at some point.  It may be the co-star of the image or it might be featured.  When falling water is the primary subject quite often the “cotton candy” effect is employed.  I know many photographers consider it an overly sentimental cliché.  It can often be a result of slow, deep in the forest shutter speeds.  Still I admit I most often intentionally create that silky effect.  I often shoot a f32 when I could use f11, just so I can slow my shutter down.  I have also used polarizing and neutral density filters to rob the scene of light.  If you look below at the top image, it was shot at 1/40th of a second.  The image is of a descending rapids in an open mountain canyon.  Depending on the abundance of light and how fast the water is moving,  generally speeds between 1/30th and 1/125th of a second will slow the water movement down close to the same speed our eyes see it.  As we move towards the bottom image you will see not only slower shutter speeds but my imagery will get progressively more abstract.  It is the way it usually works for me.  The second to last photo is my preferred.

I recently posted a gallery of landscapes made in Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado.  I mentioned that one of my few regrets of the day was that I did not have the time to view and photograph any fossilized dinosaur bones.  It brought to mind that a late 1980s ( I believe) trip to Arizona’s Painted desert which left me next door to Petrified Forest N.P.  I paid a visit and after creating a couple of overview type landscapes I did make documentary style photographs of some petrified wood.  I will photograph anything in nature and many things out of nature.

I have an entire section in my files with hundreds of images of what I call Traces & Signs.  Where animals once were.  Fallen feathers, empty nests, egg shells, tracks and much more.  The image below was made in White Sands New Mexico.  What little critter had left these during the night?   A guess is acceptable. I have tracks of many species of animals but lizard tracks found on a 2006 trip to this same location are my favorite.

For those of you who are nature photographers and live in a northern climate, what is soon to come is amazing.  Spring in the north is a non-stop adventure.  Everything happens so fast.  The bird and flower populations change daily.   Spring is of course about the “birds & the Bees”  A Bumble Bee and a couple of male Baltimore Orioles close out our gallery for today.