sun setting above the clouds near hawaii

Whenever I'm in the mood to photograph butterflies, I try to seek out large clusters of small deep-throated flowers. They seem designed just for the mouths of butterflies and during the right season, it can make for some great photos. Typically, I setup near these flowers with all my readings made in advance and hope for something like this beautiful Clipper butterfly of the Philippines to land in front of me.

Meet "Crusty" the sand crab on the coral-sand beaches of Guam. He was kind enough to not move while I setup my gear in very close proximity and capture this macro shot.

also known as 'the Grand Canyon of the Pacific', this is certainly a wonderful place to hike and shoot some film (as long as you don't mind the annual 240+ inches of rainfall).

female brown bear taking it easy (Aleutian Islands)

this is a super closeup photo of a fallen lily petal. to the naked eye, the petal appears a pale plum colour, but when zoomed in with a bunch of light, we discovered that this flower was mostly white and only had colour running through these vein-like areas. the once juicy cells are drying out which is causing the puckers & wrinkles in the clear/white areas. the coloured 'veins' measure about 0.00042 inches in diameter (a tad thinner than kitchen plastic wrap).

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.