One of the most common subjects among nature photographers, is waterfalls.  They are also one of the most diverse subjects. Really anywhere you have water falling over land, you have a waterfall.  Big or small, straight forward or abstract, falling water allows photographers to interpret and share.  I have photographed true waterfalls in 11 states, and falling water in a few more.

Below you will find the water falling sharply or at gentle angles.  In most cases you will see the soft water effect, but in one case I “stopped” the water.  Variety within any given subject is the revelation of that subject.

Wisconsin

North Carolina

Wisconsin

Colorado

Tennessee

Colorado

Wisconsin

Tennessee

I have photographed the endangered White-fringed Prairie Orchid several times over the years.  Ron led me to this location many years ago, but at that time and on several return trips, I never made a photo worth sharing.  Ugly light and winds often plague this spot and generally when I had my photographic umbrella with me for diffusion and blocking the wind, the blossoms were not out. Finally a few years ago I hit a morning when the light was fair, the wind was only slightly obnoxious, and the flower was in bloom.  While I consider the results to be only fair, they are still keepers.

I managed to find an angle where I could place out of focus prairie grasses just far enough in back of the flower to render them with only minor detail.  This plant is deep in its dimensions and I used apertures of f 18 and f 22 to capture enough of the blossoms sharp.  This meant I would have to accept some detail in those grasses.  It also meant using shutter speeds of 1/15^th and 1/8^th respectively.  Much time was spent waiting for the wind gusts to settle.

With this last picture I departed from the logic of the previous two and found a more artistic way of looking at the plant.  White on light is certainly not traditional and is not the best way to show the details in the shape of the petals, but I am rarely happy if all I do is make one type of image.  With this shot I used aperture of f 29.  With the sky as the background, too much detail was not an issue. Of course the 1/15^th sec. shutter speed once again made for some long waits for the wind to die.  I intentionally added a composition that was “off center” just like the photographer.

One of America’s more neglected (by photographers) National Parks is Petrified Forest located in northern Arizona.  Not only are the fossilized tree trunks very interesting in their patterns and colors, but the “otherworldly” landscapes here are worth some shots as well.  The northern portion of the park holds The Painted Desert.  If you have ever flown on a commercial airline over The Painted Desert, they will always point out this colorful landscape.  You can virtually see this “scape” from 30,000 feet.  My biggest gripe about PF N.P. is that it is one of those parks that has a gate with an opening and closing time.  When I was there it opened at 8:00 a.m. which does not fit my personal schedule very well, although it helped that I was there in February.  I definitely did not spend enough time on either side of the park.  The images below are old 6×7 cm and 35mm slide images that were copied to digital.

Living in Wisconsin I have not had many opportunities to photograph lizards. We only have one species here and I have never even seen one.  My trips to the west have brought me many lizard sightings, but unfortunately only four occasions where pictures have resulted. Lizards get used to people just like any wildlife.  That makes southwestern zoos and parks great places to make pictures. Three of my four species of lizard were photographed in locations that made it somewhat hard to get pictures.

The Spiny Fence Lizard you see below was hunting insects in the botanical gardens near the visitor center at Bosque del Apache NWR in New Mexico.  It was not frightened by my presence in the least. My previous (and subsequent) lizards ranged from small to tiny.  My Spiny friend below was around a foot long.  When you photograph an animal that is almost half tail, if your picture includes every inch of that tail, you will have a visually small subject for your image.  I settled for a couple of shots that almost showed its tail all the way to the end, and several close-ups.

The only down side to making these images were that I managed to get my leg and my jacket impaled with dozens of cactus spines.  For the remainder of this one week, multiple state photo trip (with Ron), I was forever being pricked in the leg or side, as I simply could not remove those spines completely from my pants and jacket.

Cactus spines may be the one hazard of nature photography that I have never mentioned.  When I lived in Colorado I had 14 acres of land on the front range to keep my two horses.  The property had its fair share of Prickly Pear Cactus.  One day as I walked to the back of the property to get my gelding Freedom, I stepped on a cactus.  I was wearing old-fashioned tennis shoes.  Shoes that were old and well-worn.  You guessed it.  Two spines went right through my shoes.  Ouch!!  Ouch for several days. The dumbest aspect of the whole thing is that all I ever had to do was call either horse and they would both come running. Those were still great times. You had to manage to avoid the thousands of Black-tailed Prairie Dog holes, which surprisingly never bothered the horses.  In winter I had to hike out into the property twice a day and use a sledge-hammer to break open the small frozen pond that provided water to my horses.  Wouldn’t have traded a minute of it.