N a t u r e
Peck Butterfly House II | a 7 Image Story
Peck Butterfly House II | a 7 Image Story The Peck Butterfly House always seems to delight with new butterflies every few weeks. Black Swallowtail Busy Although butterflies are less efficient than bees at moving pollen between plants, this Swallowtail appears to be...
Prairie Burn Goes Green | a 7 Image Story
Prairie Burn Goes Green | a 7 Image Story This set of images shows the story of a field from a planned burn to tall green vegetation in less than four months. Burned Trail Walk This field on our daily walk was burned on March 30th. Only the trees and the trail...
Gray Fox or Black Squirrel | a 7 Image Story
Gray Fox or Black Squirrel | a 7 Image Story Around the Midwest, most squirrels are gray squirrels. Still, large numbers of fox squirrels also make the Midwest their home. Then, of course, pockets of blacks squirrels also share the habitat. So, are they really...
Blue Jays | a 7 Image Story
Blue Jays | a 7 Image Story The Blue Jay is a common songbird in northern Illinois. Native to North America, at least some Blue Jays stay around all winter. They are beautiful against the snow. They seem to be a hardly bird; living up to 26 years old. Blue Jays...
Old Mission Peninsula Fall Color | a 7 Image Story
Old Mission Peninsula Fall Color | a 7 Image Story The Old Mission Peninsula leaves turned into their fall color later than the surrounding inland areas. The lake water surrounding the peninsula on three sides provides an more consistent climate for the peninsula. ...
Hunt for Red October Leaves | a 7 Image Story
Hunt for Red October Leaves | a 7 Image Story The hunt for red October leaves is much harder than it would seem in northern Illinois. Northern Illinois has many trees with yellow and/or orange leaves, but not many with deep red leaves. For the deep reds, one must...
Fall Flower Walkabout | a 7 Image Story
Fall Flower Walkabout | a 7 Image Story Summer flowers will be gone soon as fall weather gets colder and brings the season's first snow. It's their last few weeks of beauty until next spring. A nice macro lens or extension tube captures their detail. It may be...
Yellowstone NP Wild | a 7 Image Story
Yellowstone NP Wild | a 7 Image Story Wild describes the essence of Yellowstone. It's a vast wild place providing habitat where Bison, Wolf, Elk, Coyote, Pronghorn, and Bighorn Sheep as well as Bald Eagle and Raven call home. Life's survival in wild Yellowstone is...
Peck Butterfly House | a 7 Image Story
Peck Butterfly House | a 7 Image Story The Peck Butterfly House contains hundreds of butterflies that fly, feed, and land in the enclosure. It's part of the 385 acre Peck Farm Park which offers a visitors an opportunity to slow down and enjoy nature including a...
Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly | a 7 Image Story
Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly | a 7 Image Story This female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly was feeding on several flowers along my walkabout. It seemed to linger around the flowers as I clicked away. It was a chance for me to capture images of this...
Macro Flowers Plus | a 7 Image Story
Macro Flowers Plus | a 7 Image Story Macro photography is all about getting closer to the subject and making that subject bigger. It allows for very close focusing and magnification. Macro photography is still relatively new to me. My Nikon gear for these images...
The Moment After the Click | a 7 Image Story
The Moment After the Click | a 7 Image Story When capturing wildlife images even with a pleasant background in nice light, it's sometimes hard to know which images will be the best. The camera may be set for perfect exposure, but perfect focus may be much harder. ...
The Moment Before the Click | a 7 Image Story
The Moment Before the Click | a 7 Image Story When photographing landscapes in just the right place at just the right time with just the right light, there comes a moment when you know the scene in front of your lens becomes just the right image. It's that moment...
Bill’s Backyard Pond | a 7 Image Story
Bill's Backyard Pond | a 7 Image Story When visiting with Bill over coffee, I notice what a beautiful backyard he had. I seldom post about man made nature, but this yard just cried out for a post. It's so nice, he has had several weddings in his backyard. The...
Paddling Pleasant Lake | a 7 Image Story
Paddling Pleasant Lake | a 7 Image Story Paddling along Pleasant Lake's shoreline will generally yield at least a few decent images. On this day, the boat traffic was a bit heavier than usual, which made numerous waves. Capturing macro images of the water lilies...
Spring 2020 Hodgepodge | a 7 Image Story
Spring 2020 Hodgepodge | a 7 Image Story This year’s spring was wetter than normal. The flowers as well as the weeds seemed to grow sooner, faster, and higher. These images were all captured on my daily walkabouts. The big change this spring is my use of extension...
Spring Green | a 7 Image Story
Spring Green | a 7 Image Story This year's spring has brought rain; an abundance of rain. My walkabouts are filled with lush green. Green is only an OK color for me; not my favorite by a long shot. For me, it's an outside background color; not a main subject...
Morning Dove Portraits | a 7 Image Story
Morning Dove Portraits | a 7 Image Story This Morning Dove hung around the deck for a long time. It seemed to pose in several positions like a model in a photo shoot. Even the red and green background from the crab apple tree made the images appear like they were...
Natural Macro Patterns | a 7 Image Story
Natural Macro Patterns | a 7 Image Story Macro photography is all about getting closer to the subject and making that subject bigger. These images depict patterns that are not so obvious upon casual observation. To see the pattern, you must get close, real close. ...
Macro Flowers | a 7 Image Story
Macro Flowers | a 7 Image Story Macro photography allows very close focusing and magnification. Macro photography is new, brand new to me. To initially achieve a few macro images, I used extension tubes to magnify my subjects. My Nikon gear was fairly simple; a...
Spring Walkabout Birds | a 7 Image Story
Spring Walkabout Birds | a 7 Image Story Spring walkabout this year have been a bit different. More people are walking due to the virus driven stay-at-home orders. Folks are not only walking neighborhood streets but also the wooded and lakeside trails I tend to...
Last Snow Birds | a 7 Image Story
Last Snow Birds | a 7 Image Story The snow storm this week will likely be the last of the season. Spring is only a few days away. The snow on the trees melted by the afternoon. These images are of common, local birds. Still, capturing the falling snow in the...
Cooper’s Hawk | a 7 Image Story
Cooper's Hawk | a 7 Image Story The Cooper's Hawk is a medium-sized hawk with rounded wings and a long tail. Several Red-tailed Hawks and a few Cooper's Hawks call this area home. To me, the immature Cooper's Hawk looks like a Red-tailed Hawk from a distance. ...
Everglades | a 7 Image Story
Everglades | a 7 Image Story Everglades NP is impressive not by its majestic scenery but by it's water. Its landscape is relatively flat. Moreover, the everglades is all about the water and swampy land. What's under the water. What's on the water and land. The...
Wildlife | a 7 Image Story
Wildlife | a 7 Image Story Picking seven wildlife images from the thousands in my database was difficult. These images were primarily chosen because they represent some of my best compositions. Like these images, many of my favorite wildlife images come from the...
Backyard Winter Birds | a 7 Image Story
Backyard Winter Birds | a 7 Image Story Each winter the snow provides contrast and background for backyard birds. Even though the same bird species tend to feed at the backyard bird feeder each winter, it's still a challenge to get nice images. The Nikon 1 V3 with...
The Badlands | a 7 Image Story
The Badlands | a 7 Image Story The Badlands are truly inspiring. There’s something rather spiritual about Badlands NP. Perhaps, it’s the stark contrasts, the native American influence, or the large expanse of rock formations. Taking time to reflect on the...
Koalas | a 7 Image Story
Koalas | a 7 Image Story Koalas are just so cute. You have to love them. Now, they need our help. They are native to eastern Australia, where the eucalyptus trees are plentiful. But now, the fires are killing the koalas and destroying the eucalyptus trees....
Backyard Coyote | a 7 Image Story
Backyard Coyote | a 7 Image Story Wow! What a nice life; a backyard coyote. Well, it's not really in the backyard; more like the back, backyard better known as wetlands and forest. The coyote is a wild animal whether roaming in the wetlands or walking the...
Landscapes | a 7 Image Story
Landscapes | a 7 Image Story Trying to pick just 7 images from my landscape image database proved to take longer than intended. These images are certainly representative of the types of landscapes that tend to get in front of my camera. Many folks like to capture...
Hawk Poses | a 7 Image Story
Hawk Poses | a 7 Image Story It's all about a single hawk, a Red-tailed Hawk, that posed for me at several locations along my walkabout today through the forest. While walking along the trail, I spotted the hawk in a tree about twenty yards off the trail. It must...
Fine Art | a 7 Image Story
Fine Art | a 7 Image Story My idea of fine art images consists mostly of black & white compositions with definite contrasts and contours. These images were converted to black & white from color since it makes better B&W images than shooting directly in...
Icy Leaves | a 7 Image Image
Icy Leaves | a 7 Image Image Ice and leaves don't normally go together. An early fall snowstorm provided four inches of wet icy snow in late October. The leaves were at peak color or perhaps just after peak color when the snow fell overnight. By the next day,...
Autumn Leaves | a 7 Image Story
Autumn Leaves | a 7 Image Story When we think of fall color, we often think of beautiful vistas of multi-colored trees. The color, of course, comes from the tree's leaves. The leaves themselves can offer a beautiful mosaic when viewed close up. These images were...
Pronghorn | a 7 Image Story
Pronghorn | a 7 Image Story Pronghorn are an original Native American animals. They are found only in North America. Although often called an antelope, they are not antelope. They belong to a family of their own; one of a kind. Pronghorn are symbolic of the...
Bighorn Sheep | a 7 Image Story
Bighorn Sheep | a 7 Image Story Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep are found in western Canada and western United States. These images were captured at Badlands NP and Yellowstone NP. Bighorn Sheep are the largest wild sheep in North America. A large ram can weigh over...