Category Archives: Photography

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Green is Easy on My Eyes

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I work for a Conservation Foundation. We try very hard to be green! Protecting watersheds and wildlife habitat while preventing the development of natural lands into human-dominated environments is a labor of passion and commitment for me. Green is not just my favorite color and the highlight in my eyes, it is my preferred world view! Here’s my green gallery:


It IS Easy Being Green!

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Atop

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Mountaintop experiences give you a spiritual perspective. The sky is bigger; the minutiae of the earth is even smaller.  

Humility and awe meet you at the top of your climb. 

The view (and the climb!) is breathtaking.

And the opportunity to stay atop a while and ponder your place on the crust of Earth is a special reward. 

Seek higher ground. It’s good for your soul.

 

 
Atop

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Wish

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I wish for the health and happiness of all beings, all inhabitants of this planet. May the land be happy…

May the water be happy…

May the air be happy…

May all the plants be happy…

May all the animals be happy…

And may all the people be happy.


Wish

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Weekly Photo Challenge: The Road Taken

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These photo challenge subjects so often coincide with an experience I just had! I’ve just driven a rather harrowing 5.5 miles from my office back home in a white-out blizzard of Wisconsin spring snow. The county road goes up a steep incline of glacial terrain, and the snowplows hadn’t gotten to it when I and 4 others began the ascent. I was slipping sideways and barely able to get to the top in first gear with my 11-year old Honda Accord with front wheel drive. Needless to say, I wasn’t taking any photos during this journey!

Now that I’m safely home at my laptop, I’m thinking back to another wild road experience. I was so excited to travel through the Jemez mountains in New Mexico in October…the bright yellow of the cottonwood leaves, the blue sky and the red rock were absolutely stunning! The next day, we traveled the same route and were caught in a hailstorm that almost stranded us at the summit under two inches of icy pellets. Of course, I don’t have photos of that part of the trip, only the sunny splendor of the initial journey. 

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scilla in NM
The Road Taken

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Weekly Photo Challenge: A Good Match

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A “satisfying pairing” you say? Oh, so many come to mind…

There are, obviously, the many combinations of happily mated people:

As well as deliciously married flavors, like cheese and truffles or herbs:

cheese

And then there are the natural cooperations of plants and animals, like the monarch butterfly that feeds on milkweed in the larval stage and then benefits from that toxin as an adult that is distasteful to predators and pollinates wildflowers:

monarch prince

Sometimes, though, it’s just as satisfying to put two things together that don’t seem to have much in common – just for the hell of it: 

prickly feathery cold

Even if you never liked all those essay questions you answered in High School that started with “Compare and contrast….”, you probably learned something by thinking about them. What I hope to learn in the Match Games I play is appreciation — because the world is full of fascinating examples of A Good Match. 

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A Good Match

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Against the Odds

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What are the odds of marrying your High School sweetheart and keeping your vows “until parted by death” in the 21st century?

scan0027 What are the odds of having open heart surgery at age 31?

ancient suffering

What are the odds of having the love you have, the life you have, the family you have, the memories you have? 

Well, I don’t think the odds mean anything. People don’t live by the numbers. We live by the moment.  Don’t you?

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Against the Odds

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Shadow

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The shadow side is dark but not evil.frame b wIt may look like a negative, but it is not bad.

might be giants

A shadow presents a contrasting view. 

shadow-bench

And may highlight something you might otherwise have missed. 

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So I try to appreciate the shadow side as well as the sunny side. After all, we need both in order to see the richness and depth in life.

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Shadow

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitude and Wilderness

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The Wilderness Act of 1964 established a means for our nation to set aside large parcels of land where the human presence is temporary. Among other valuable things, this provides for “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined experience” for those temporary visitors who enter its space and leave it “untrammeled”.

Why is wilderness and solitude important to the human soul? I would argue that it is vital to our perception of our place in the Universe, a place of humility, not dominance or mastery….

hero

…and a place of natural social freedom. 

pinnacles summit

Solitude is instrumental in developing self-knowledge and strength of character.

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When we seek solitude, it is often because we are looking for a greater level of honesty,…contemplating colors…a greater level of awareness.

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To defile these areas of wilderness and solitude is an act of violence that attacks our own freedom and causes us to be unnaturally enslaved. I think it’s imperative that we protect the places in our country that still exist as wilderness and to restrict the encroachment of human development and over-population that threaten them, not only or even primarily for our own benefit, but because any real understanding of humility demands it. 

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Solitude