Looks like these two are watching each others' back preparing for a mission.

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.

unique purple lily blooms in southern China

I'm walking along a bridge in northern Kauai and notice the tree tops are at eye-level for easy shooting. I pan around for the best cluster of Locust branches and then patiently wait for the slightest of breezes to pause long enough to capture this shot.

a super closeup of an ant's head showing a portion of it's face along with half of it's lateral eye. visually, the entire head appeared a stealthy black, but the photography lighting caused the eye to glow a dark red which made for some interesting contrast. each of the micro-lenses on the compound eye, measure 0.00074 inches in diameter (1,350 of them would make inch). another interesting effect is how the translucent hairs acted like lenses and focused our lighting into little hotspots on the scaly surface.

southern China

we scouted for days along the Oregon coast, looking for the right balance of rock mounds in combination with the right moment of setting sun light.

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.