Cropping
I usually crop out extraneous clutter, aiming to exclude the man-made. Yet, many of my photos are taken within city limits. The image above, for instance, was captured on my iPhone from my roof during a photogenic storm; I left the muted cityscape in because it added a necessary layer to the frame. Beauty is where you find it, but you have to look.
I’ve been heading to the roof during storms since I was a kid in Michigan, watching tornado clouds form over the empty fields behind my house. My neighbors likely wonder what’s wrong with me, but as Supertramp sang in 1979: “…you can laugh at my behavior and that’ll never bother me….” To quote Supertramp again, I’ve been “taking the long way home” for a very long time.
Processing
I don’t use Photoshop or other robust editing software. My process is simple: shots from my iPhone or Nikon go to the iPad to be cropped or “trued-up” in the native Photos app to better represent the actual colors. That’s it. And no AI.
Birds & Wildflowers
Birds are the most accessible wildlife we encounter. You don’t need a rural trek to find them—they are everywhere, vocal and vivid. I often hear a bird long before I see it; it took me a year of hearing a Sora in a local wetland before I finally saw one and even longer to snag a (poor quality) photo. Birding is a game that can be played anywhere, and it will be challenging at nearly every turn.
Wildflowers make the ground explode with color, acting as “natural punctuation marks” that ask you to pause. In Montana, I can find them from March through November. Unlike birds, they aren’t prone to flying away, which makes identification much easier.
I enjoy the colors both provide at no charge and with no expectations. While I try to mix in various landscapes and organisms, my posts may skew toward birds simply because of their year-round prevalence.
A Note on Rights
I captured every image on this site and retain all rights to them. If you see something you like, please don’t steal it. Contact me—we can probably work something out.
Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
Frank Lloyd Wright
