foliage on the tropical island of Guam

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.

This is a Great Horned Owl at about 3½ weeks of age. Quite a darling little puff-ball of feathers sitting there wondering what the guy with the camera is up to. The mom isn't due back for a couple hours so I have a chance to capture this cute creature for everyone to enjoy.

Typically when I shoot autumn images, I am biased toward early autumn so that there is more green with only some yellows and orange. I so much appreciate the lush greens that nature produces and it looks so full of life. Although fall colours are quite beautiful, I still prefer to maintain a fair amount of green in the photo as this makes the other autumn colours more pronounced and appreciable.

these large birds appear to have infinite patience as they stand motionless for hours waiting for their meal to swim by.

I was set up for this whitewater section of rapids and took several shots, freezing the splashes of water at different moments in time. It was an extremely wet area from all the mist, and the lens had to be wiped down between each shot. Then I continued my hike up stream, shooting along the way. At the base of the falls, it was time to change film. For an unknown reason, my camera indicated that I had rewound the film completely, but a good portion was actually still vulnerable. When I opened up the back, boy was I surprised to have just exposed my work to daylight. Having no idea which part I had just ruined, I retraced my steps and began re-shooting each scene with a different camera back in hopes to not repeat the malfunction. While in wooded areas, since many scenes are shaded by neighboring trees, I commonly will first hike unencumbered with gear to calculate the ideal time of day for that particular scene. Thankfully, my window of light for this area was long enough to obtain a second set of exposures.

a secluded little waterfall along the road to Hana in Maui

clearly appearing like something out of a Hollywood special-effects laboratory, this unreal-looking skin is actually quite common and is perhaps devouring something right outside your back door... it is a super-closeup of a June Bug's thorax (shoulder blade equivalent). the June Bugs in our area are an uninteresting plain brown, but as we explored it's outer surface, we noticed a very small metallic-looking shiny spot. far too small to see with the naked eye, we zoomed in on this spot and discovered it to be made up of many 'skin' cells of reds, oranges, and yellows each measuring around 1/3000 of an inch across. the green jellybean-like objects are actually pits in the bug's shell and have a hair growing out of each one (similar to a human pore). these deep bowel-shaped pits (about 1/400 of an inch long) were lined with more metallic-type cells that reflected our lighting back in various greens.