home grown soda bottles? well, not quite. laying across the bottom of the photo is the edge of a daisy's stem, and the 'bottle' is a single hair/fuzz (1/60 of an inch in height) protruding from that stem. daisy plants have bristly stems (in between soft and prickly) so the fuzz has a larger diameter making it more stiff, and as we recently discovered... it's also hollow and uniquely shaped. to add a little colour, we placed a small piece of yellow tractor-feed paper as a background, so that the out-of-focus hole created a nice glow on the horizon.

I'm standing at the top of Mount Haleakala in Maui as the sun is rising above the clouds. Although I'm in the tropics, it is below freezing here at two miles up and I wasn't as prepared as I would have liked. My day started at 1:30am to initiate the drive up the mountain in time for this event, and wasn't about to leave due to cold air. I got a good location scouted out and quickly set up my gear with some jumping jacks in between to keep the blood flowing. The sun seemed to be extra slow this morning (it must have been cold, also) and in time, I got the shakes from loss of body temperature. Fortunately, the event finally started in all its beauty and the cable release removed all my thermal tremors from the image.

looking straight down toward the tops of foliage and a simple dirt (mud) road.

My friend and master gardener was showing me the sites and we came across her favorite of all trees, the chionanthus virginicus, or fringe tree. In late spring it blooms with drooping clusters of white flowers. I now understand her passion for the tree as is had a very soft friendly appearance with a lovely scent from it's quantity of blooms.

this is a closeup shot of a copper snake chain necklace. the islands of gold are parts of corroded copper links that are kept bright by constantly rubbing against the skin. the aqua river is the remaining part of the copper that goes down into valleys between chain links where the corrosion has gone untouched and turned a beautiful blue-green. the chain of this necklace measures 0.045 of an inch in diameter and this photo captures an area equivalent to the thickness of a credit card.

when large brown bears come out out their winter slumber, they're hungry and are looking for the easiest food available. bears favor easy food that does not require a chase, battle, or conflict, and salmon meets those requirements quite well (also good news for me behind the camera). it is common to see these bears standing in a stream waiting for their meal to attempt to swim by. this one perched himself atop a small falls where the salmon have to jump to beat the down-rushing current.

ruffle and stripe details on a giant Bearded Iris

hot mineral springs in Wyoming