Having such a small body and graciously long wings, the Tiger Longwing doesn't flap quickly like most butterflies. Instead, it creates a very elegant slow-flutter to navigate through the rain-forest foliage in Brazil. It's motion is very different from what i'm accustomed to in the northern hemisphere, and i found it quite mesmerizing.

an 80-foot waterdrop along the McKenzie River in Willamette National Forest

I particularly liked the lines in this image; the way trees and shrubbery were growing up the sides matched the angle of the peaks. The mountain walls were exceptionally steep (nearly vertical) which made it easier to capture the grassland foreground and keep the mountain peaks crisp and close. The sun was still early and somewhat low which pronounced the roughness and magnitude of this shear wall of rock.

Ka'anapali Beach is famous for it's gentle shallow waters and beautiful ocean sunsets like this one.

a Cinnamon Fern in bloom

I planned my passage through southern Arizona when the giant saguaros would be in bloom. I always enjoy shooting flowers, but these blooms posed a new problem for me - they were all twenty to thirty feet above ground. As I hiked around exposing film on all sorts of life, I not only came across a good steep hill, but it had a large healthy cactus growing right next to it. Thanking mother nature for making this possible, I set up on the side of the hill and maxed out my largest zoom lens to capture these blooms.

closely resembling a (well used) golf ball, this is actually a super closeup shot of a Zinnia's flower petal. the petals have a cool pattern of dimples each measuring about 1/1000th of an inch across. we then focused a ultra-tiny spotlight so that the shaft of light was the size of a human hair (smaller than a laser beam). as the highly focused light bled out through the relatively flat petal (see inset), it created the shading effect of a round ball.

This scene has summer fun and relaxation written all over it. It was late June and a perfect day for the season. Climbing down the steep embankment, I was actually standing in several inches of water to get a good view of the mountain peak framed nicely between the nearby trees. I waited for the ripples I created to disappear, and adjusted the tripod rather low to capture the stones just below the water's surface. The way the water refracted from being able to see the bottom of the lake, which slowly faded into the reflections from the far shore, was a nice bonus.