The American Goldfinch is one of those birds that fits into the colorful yet cute category.  Every once in a while they become a little fancy and almost exotic. There is nothing like a great pose to turn an average shot into a good one.

A Great-blue Heron during breeding season can be exotic as well.

There is nothing like frozen water after it melts and the re-freezes.   It gives the photographer so many interesting shapes to work with.  I would almost always head out with my camera when we had that freeze, thaw, refreeze sequence take place.A little ice, a few colorful rocks, some water

I went 20 years without finding a Polyphemus Moth Caterpillar, and then found three of them in three different locations on three consecutive days. I guess I just never looked at the right time before.

I would imagine that to a non-insect photographer, photographing dragonflies might seem difficult. They can be a challenge but I find them easier than a fluttering butterfly. They are territorial and they will usually find a good perch and return to it….even after we frighten them away.  Many species will also hunt from a perch.  When possible I prefer to make those same type of clean and simple compositions that work so well with birds.  Such was the case with this Twelve-spotted Skimmer.

When you are traveling in the mountains, it is natural to want to make grand mountain landscapes.  It is normally what I do. After two days in Washington State’s Olympic Range and a day in Mt. Ranier N.P. doing just that, I was looking for something different in the Northern  Cascades.  I stopped several times to make more intimate landscapes, and used the mountains for sort of a semi-abstract study of mountains, usually making use of backlight.  The first picture below was made along the road.  It is a tiny trickle of water dripping down the side of a mountain. In the second photo I minimized the mountains to a small corner of my composition. This image tends to look monochromatic, but is indeed a full color shot. Sadly the skies closed in and my opportunities for traditional, intimate and unique images were gone.I always seem to find (yet) another picture of Red Foxes.  I spotted this one while going through some files yesterday.

I certainly have images of Common Loons that are more mainstream and probably better liked than the image below. This is one of ten frames of film of loons made on my first visit (and first loon images) to Crex Meadows State Wildlife Area, WI.  After copying this picture into the digital format I did something I have never done with a wildlife photo before. I went into Photoshop and de-saturated the picture.  It was a perfectly normal picture made on Fujichrome 100 film at the very last ray of light, on a summer’s day. No filters or anything else to enhance the colors. Each of those ten loon pictures is dripping in so much color, that they are not believable. I love nature and photography, and what I have seen is sometimes beyond description.

“When listening to men, seeing is believing, when listening to God, believing is seeing”  Wayne Nelson