I think one thing I have long ago established, is that when I am creating landscapes I love the warm light of early or late in the day, and I love the shadows that the low angled sidelight creates.  Oh yeah, I also have a thing for texture.  Of course texture is created by those little shadows that result from sidelight.  Let’s see, is there anything else I like?  I do like carefully thought out compositions that bring order out of the chaos that exists when you have low angled sidelight in an environment that consists of a variety of shapes, textures and tones.  I guess I am saying that I enjoy creating the type of landscapes that can be made at Badlands N. P. under those conditions.  Just the same, that’s a lot of decisions.

One of my favorite spring wildflowers in these parts is the Shooting Star.  They bloom in both open woodlands and prairies.  Compositionally I think an image like this works whether those background blossoms are sharp, semi soft or completely soft.  I do believe that the first flower needs to be sharp.  In fact with this species of flower I think it needs to be razor-sharp.  If I would have shallowed my depth of field enough to render the background flowers completely soft instead of semi soft, I would have missed the focus on the portion of the foreground blossom that is farthest away from the camera.  Photography is a series of problems that need to be solved and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Reflections are a great artistic tool and I use them whenever I can.  While I like crisp and perfect mirrored reflections, there are many other ways to use a reflection.  I was fascinated by these rock forms in Custer State Park, South Dakota.  I love the rocks themselves but also the way most of them grew straight out of the water.  There was just enough rippling effect that I knew there would be no mirror image.  Just the same what I really loved about the rock was how they came out of the water directly, with no land mass in between.  I decided that using the somewhat muddled reflections still added some pop to the pictures.  Decisions are the very root of nature photography and that’s what keeps photographers engrossed in that endeavor for years and years.

The truth is of course that even if there are no reflections of objects, like rocks or the sun, that red colored water is still a reflection of the morning sky.

My main decision here was how much water, how much sky?   The sky was red but otherwise featureless.  The answer to my decision was easy.

This Pied-billed Grebe (from several years ago) was swimming slow enough that I could stop down to f11.  I had a lot of time to photograph this bird in the Duckweed and review my pictures.  This was a rare time that this species neither dove or swam away.  I seriously wanted the grebe to be tack sharp in the face or even more, and the Duckweed to be soft in front of and in back of the bird. F 9 even produced too much depth of field, and F4 left too much of the bird out of focus. F 6.3 was absolutely perfect.  In my opinion the image would not have worked if any portion of the neck and head were anything but tack sharp. While it is true that more Duckweed in focus would have worked, a close examination of the bird (in the photo) would have made it less compelling.  After you finish a normal view of the this picture and think in your mind that all is in focus, look critically close at the picture.  The Duckweed goes soft in either direction from the grebe.  It allows the bird to pop.  Decisions, decisions, and our final answer can mean more than we sometimes think.

Obviously you often don’t get to carefully contemplate these things with wild animals. A long time ago I did however discover that we have that opportunity more times than we think.

A number of years ago I was teaching a workshop at a small zoo.  The class was small enough and there was enough time for me to do more than teach just wildlife portraits.  There are wild birds and mammals, as well as flowers, insects and people in zoos.  I always struggled with how to best manage my time in these cases, but ultimately most of the people who attended these workshops will take more human interest (friends family, etc.) photos in their life than they will wild, animals.  Whenever possible I gave them something of human interest to photograph.  After working on Meercat portraits we switched to combination animal people /shots.  The second Meercat image is a crop.

How to manage my time in workshops was always the hardest decision I had to make.  I once taught a 3 hour one on one workshop that over lasted 6 hours.  They always lasted 4 hours.  Teaching photography is just like anything  else in photography……what to leave in……what to leave out, or better said……decisions, decisions.

I wrote an article about a while ago on how I once spent a week horse back riding in Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine State Forest.  That brought to mind another horse back riding experience.

Way back in the 1970s I owned the rights to 14 acres of land well outside of Denver, Colorado.  It was a few miles from the foothills of the Rocky Mts.  My wife and I kept our two horses there.  The first two acres boarded a rural road.  They were planted with alfalfa hay and we used to combine that with Timothy North Park grass hay that we had purchased, to feed our horses Chicago and Freedom.  The driveway headed towards the back and a family owned home with a large yard sat in-between the hay-field and the horse property.  The back property was 12 acres and it had a natural spring fed pond along with about a thousand Black-tailed Prairie Dogs, a handful of Western Cottontail Rabbits, a large population of Black-tailed Jackrabbits, at least two Western King Snakes and an occasional visit from Western Diamondback Rattlesnakes.  In back of our property came a mix of wetlands, prairie and small woodlands.  This area was frequented by cranes and egrets.  You can imagine that with all of those bunnies and prairie dogs, predators (besides those snakes)  spent a lot of time on this property.

My wife and I saddled up Freedom and Chicago, and called Samantha our dog to come along. Our other dog Shannon stayed at home as she had bad feet and was too tiny for this anyway. We barely got beyond our own property when staring us in the face, was three of the cutest and tiniest Coyote cubs you ever saw.  This might have been their first day out of the den.  The den was at the base of an old Oak Tree, and there was a small pond only ten feet away.  Seeing we had Samantha with us…..we wondered where mom and dad Coyote might be.  A loose dog with two Coyotes that had small babies near-by, could mean sure death for our lovable dog.  Luckily she was well-mannered and when we passed the babies, she minded herself very well.  Suddenly an adult Coyote popped up and began yipping at us and/or our dog.  We made an immediate right turn only to find father Coyote standing in front of us.  On three legs. Coyotes were persecuted beyond belief in Colorado at that time.  Traps were set everywhere although it was usually cats and both feral and domestic dogs that wound up in the traps.  Still from time to time a hungry Coyote would get caught, and they would often chew off their own leg to get loose.  Freedom (not my horse) at any cost.  The funny thing is that Samantha and the Coyotes never tangled.  They observed each other and the worried Coyote parents watched her and us until we were long gone.  Samantha and the wild ones actually gave each other that sort of “dog smile” and exchanged glances that seemed to say, “no problem” just respect our family. Samantha was a lover not a fighter.  It didn’t seem to frighten Samantha at all, but her parents were definitely concerned with her well-being. I suppose if she was running alone it might have been different, but this was an illuminating experience for both of us.

In the future we made sure we told absolutely nobody about the Coyote family, and that we did not take Samantha on future rides in the area.

Hopefully my ex-wife would forgive me for mentioning her twice recently, but it is difficult to recant stories from parts of my life without including her. The story above would be dishonest if I didn’t mention her.

That all happened a long time ago and I hope you will forgive these occasional flashbacks of mine, but as I have said before, you can’t really know or understand someone if you do not know what they have done and where they have been.

For today’s photographer, I present to you Lewis Kemper.  Lewis is a well-known veteran and full-time pro photographer and public speaker.  I do not know Lewis personally but I like him  because he occasionally takes the time to acknowledge the work of others, and will often thank those who comment on his Facebook postings.  He also posts photos on Facebook that he has not worked on, and then will ask what the viewers think needs to be done.  If he decides on a crop he will post that and inquire if it is an improvement.  That shows that he is void of the super-ego that many current photographers possess.  Enjoy his work!

If you are like me you probably wonder what your life would be like if at some point along the way, you turned right instead of left, or took one more risk in an effort to complete something that you started.  One thing is for sure, none of us can go back and do it again.  I think that learning from yesterday, and living today at its best, it is as much as we can hope for.  Never regret yesterday, it is what makes you who you are today….and that is special.

God Bless,                                                                                                                                               Wayne