a fun place to roam around with a camera within a remote corner of the Utah wilderness

southern China

dense bamboo forest in southern Maui

Many northern states like Montana have an abundance of colourful stones delivered by glaciers long ago. These happen to be at the edge of a lake under a few inches of water. The entire beach area and bottom of the lake (as far as I could see) was covered in this manner and the stones just under the water provided great rich colour with minimal wave distortion. To be able to shoot straight down and not have any perspective in the stone pattern, I stood in the water and waited for the ripples to disappear before capturing this neat texture image.

Torch Ginger bloom in southern Maui

when a large mass of lava cools very slowly, it can create column-like fissures during it's cooling. then, over the years, water and ice push the columns apart and the outer pillars topple giving you a scene like this one. there's only a handful of places on earth where conditions were just right for these strange rock formations to form.

this is a closeup shot of an Asiatic Lily. toward the base of each petal, are two short rows of fleshy-hairs running down the center (easily gone unnoticed). as the dark red petal nears the main flower stem, it makes a quick transition to white and then green. this shot captures the tiny fuzz (gummi worms in foreground) near the base of the petal (green brick-like cells in background) during that multi-colour transition. each 'worm' measures 0.0021 inches in diameter (a row of 475 would make an inch).

as the snow accumulates in the high mountains, it stacks up and begins to slide down the mountain side as a glacier. as the glacier continues to get pushed from behind (from more incoming snow), it becomes packed into a very dense ice and can travel decades across the country side. sometimes they end by finally giving way to the heat, and turn into a stream of icy cold water. other times they end by crumbling into an ocean like this one.