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The seasons are important to outdoor photographers.

Today let’s begins today’s post with the two sort of in-between seasons, autumn and spring.

Bond Falls in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is a joy to view, and fun to photograph. Every season is good there but I love fall the most.

Often backlight or extreme sidelight can be a difficult exposure problem. What helps in the image below is that those autumn leaves are somewhat translucent, and the waves of water have enough whitecaps, to balance everything out.

Springtime in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee is an exhilarating experience. The image below was created in April, many, many years ago. It was created on film and that slide was copied on a daylight balanced light table, with my digital camera and a 105 macro lens. The photo feels like spring, and it was made in spring.

Great moments make for great memories.

Birds are certainly one of the main subjects for nature photographers. With good reason. Those images are in demand and are fun to create.

The first photo below is a “first winter” Horned Grebe. This is one of my favorite critters. The second is the unique and beautiful male Bufflehead Duck. I loved the way the sun bounced off his gorgeous markings around his face.

Avian photography is not just about being able to identify a bird. It’s about shape and form, action and mood. Below are a quartet of Sandhill Cranes as they paddle their way through the air waves at dawn or dusk. Panning skills are essential for shots like this. I honed my skills photographing car racing with machines traveling at times, well over 200 mph.

Most animals have some sort of “relations” with others. Cousins if you will. Such is the case below. The first is swimming with debris in its mouth as it is on the way to a half built Beaver dam. Which of course makes this critter a Beaver.

The Muskrat has both similarities and differences with the Beaver. As I said, cousins. The one below is chowing down on some marsh grasses.

On the hunt.

It seemed as though I was oblivious to this hunting Coyote. It was hunting in Yellowstone N. P., and at one point walked within a couple of feet from me.

Let us take a brief sidestep from nature and a view a celebratory explosion that was created, shared, and displayed by humans.

Photographing fireworks can be a very literal experience when you show an entire explosion, and do so in the context of manmade things like parking lots, harbors, boats, cars and people. Just like any subject, there is also an abstract way of looking at the fireworks. Focus in tight and there is nothing but light streaks, and darkness.

Finally, let us close with a picture frame of edge to edge flowers. I was about to label these blossoms as Bluets but that does not seem correct. Whatever they are called, I am happy to have photographed them and to have shared them with you. The flowers are beautiful, but never over look the light. In this case it was perfect to illuminate the subject yet separate it from the dark background.

Light, subject, composition. Any one of those things can help make a nice photo, but together they can be a powerful force.

For me there were few things that exhilarated me more than beginning a new day of searching for subjects in nature. Of course, as we see in he fireworks display, when darkness sets in man will often replace the natural world with things that are worth the effort of making pictures.

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I see we as a nation, have finally began our journey down the road of the Great Depression of the 1920s. The Silicon Valley Bank, the name Silicon Valley itself should terrify us, has folded. It is the largest bank failure by dollars and cents, in U.S. history. How it took this long is a miracle of God.

Now as I get ready to publish this post, I see yet another bank has collapsed.

We do have to recognize that the hyperinflation that we are seeing today, means a dollar is merely a few cents by past numbers. Still, it might take only one “woke”, money foolish bank, to make inroads into a conceivably worldwide chain of events, that puts every honest soul, including those who work hard and do the right thing, at the mercy of governments. Run often by selfish, foolish people who care only about convincing you of how kind they are, while they fill their own pockets as they manipulate the “common folk” into complacency. Many are being led down the primrose path, with a smile on their face. Was if W.C. Fields that said, there’s “a sucker born every minute” ?

One thing we see now worldwide, is an attempt, which I certainly believe will eventually become a reality, to do away wish paper money, coins and such. England and other places get closer all the time. Maybe a scan code to use to buy something. That’s an idea that is being floated. Maybe in some fashion we could carry a mark on say our right hand or forehead, or some form of such?

You know, there was a book written a long time ago, that predicts the road we are on.

May God help us,
Wayne