Golden light – an October sunset in Wisconsin. I had this shot pictured in my mind before I left the house. I knew where I was going, where I was going to stand and how I was going to frame the shot. I had the location scouted a couple days earlier and waited for the […]
A maple leaf falls from its tree and becomes entangled in a spider web before it can reach the ground. Twirling in the wind, the leaf is suspended in air and in time – a purgatory somewhere between captivity and freedom, life and death, summer and winter. Maybe there is hope in the leaf’s struggle, […]
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. – William Blake, 1799, […]
The Asian Lady Beetle is not the same insect as the “Lady Bug” we remember from childhood. This species, native to Asia, was introduced into the south by entomologists as early as 1916 in hopes of controlling aphid populations. In 1988, after several attempts, the Lady Asian Beetle population finally took hold, with colonies being […]
There are more than 2,700 species of snakes around the world, and since that little ordeal in the Garden of Eden, they have gotten a bad rap. Granted, there are some extremely dangerous, venomous snakes out there, but the majority of them are harmless, even beneficial as they eat insects and rodents. This one, the […]
Folklore weather predictions – there must be millions of them, and rightly so. Weather used to rule people’s lives, and at a time before radar and the weather channel, almost any form of forecasting was embraced, long-term forecasting being a particular art form. I think the folklore surrounding the Woolly Bear caterpillar is my favorite… […]
Milkweeds are fascinating plants. The “milk” it secretes is toxic to most animals and actually contains latex. In fact, during World War II, both the Germans and Americans tried to harvest the milk as a source of natural rubber – neither found much success. The milk was also used as a folk remedy for removing […]
Scientists still don’t have an answer for why honeybees are disappearing… North American honeybee populations have dropped by as much as 70% in the past few years. Whole hives vanish over night and no trace of the missing bees are ever found. No living bees, no honeybee bodies – they’re just gone. It’s the stuff […]
Lens flare – most of the time, we’re trying to avoid it… we have lens hoods, we change the angle of our shots and we stick our hands up above our lens to shield the shot from the sun – photographers, when you’re employing this technique in public, do you ever get the feeling that […]
Flickrfox – for those Flickr users out there, this is a must-have Firefox extension. Your contact’s uploads are ever present in a little browser sidebar. Click on a photo and you’re taken right to the Flickr photo page to post your comment or add a fave or whatever. It makes it very easy to keep […]
