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.

hiking through Waimea canyon on Kauai

Wild raspberry bushes in northern Indiana

foliage on the tropical island of Guam

a pleasant combination of rocky cliffs and thick forest in southern Illinois. i was lucky to find a very large fallen boulder to climb up on to get above the brush and capture this view.

close-up shot of a young tree bud

JiuZhaiGou, China

this is a closeup shot of the feathery scales on a Monarch butterfly wing. each scale has a length of around 1/220 of an inch, so the height of this entire shot would be equivalent to the thickness of 3 sheets of paper. this particular butterfly died naturally near our studio, so we took the opportunity to explore what it had to offer.