Monarchs are probably my favorite butterfly. I'm sure there are prettier I could choose, but there's more to it than that. I like them because they're locals, and they just look like they're cruzin' for a good time when they're flying. They really belong in Santa Cruz.

This photo was taken with my 100mm f/2.8 macro lens, which lets me get as close as 1 foot to the subject... that's one foot from the plane of the sensor. The lens is about 6 inches long, so the front of my lens was about 6 inches from this butterfly. He didn't seem to care. ECCO has this lovely butterfly bush that the critters just adore. I parked myself in the middle of it and wait for what comes. I'll post a few more shots of the various critters who were partaking of this butterfly bush. One morning, I was visited by the most perfect huge butterfly (this one). That afternoon, I was visited by one that was considerably beat up. Could have been the same one, I suppose, if he ran into an uninformed bird.

Birds will sometimes go after a monarch, but only once. Monarchs, being poisonous, don't taste very good to birds. They're unlikely to kill a bird, but the bird will probably avoid large orange-and-black butterflies from then on.

View my ECCO gallery for more photos taken in the California Foothills, just south of Yosemite.

This is another one of my favorite places in the world. This is the Big Sur River Gorge. Located inside the Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, this gorge is the highlight of our annual camping trip to Big Sur. Affectionately called by some "The Death March", the hike we take up through the river gorge is beautiful, strenuous, exhilarating, dangerous, but most of all a great time. You really get to exercise your hanging-on-for-dear-life muscles.

This photo was taken towards the end of our hike where we came upon an enormous logjam (okay, a rock-and-log jam) several stories high. To get through, we literally have to climb through it. You can kinda see right in the middle where we have to climb up through a chimney. Water pours down upon us as we climb.

This year, the water was the lowest we've seen in several years. That makes the climb relatively easy.

Not much to say about the composition of this photograph. It was cool to get lots of people in it all at once. I was able to carry my trusty Canon Powershot S50 in its underwater housing to protect it from the water and from myself banging it against the rocks.

To see more photos from our camping trip, visit the Big Sur 2007 Gallery.

For the last several years, Shannon has been taking Ballet through Pamela Trokanski Dance Workshop. Every year, at the end of May or beginning of June, they put on a Student Concert where each class performs. Photography is allowed, under one strict condition: NO FLASH.

This is a particularly difficult assignment for me. Consider the situation: Low light, fast-moving subjects, and no flash. This is the fourth time on this assignment, and I have to admit that I'm getting better. This year was probably the best ballet photos I've taken. For more photos, please take a look at the whole Ballet Gallery. You can also view them via the slideshow

I can attribute some of my success to the valuable advice I receive from a wonderful podcast called Shutters Inc., particularly this episode where they respond to a letter I wrote asking for advice on how to take live stage photos. Basically, they said I need more light, so try getting closer, and using a faster lens. That means a lens with a lower f-stop value.

Fortunately, I had a f/1.8 lens on hand, so I used that. Unfortunately (kinda) that lens is a fixed 50mm lens, not a zoom. So, the only difference in perspective that I got was when the dancers were closer to me or farther away. A benefit of such a lens was that I didn't have to screw around with zooming. In a short amount of time I could tell exactly what my frame was going to look like before I even lifted the camera to my eye. Shelton said that he can get 1/100sec shots staying on ISO-100. I had no such luck. Perhaps the Veterans' Memorial Center Theatre in Davis just isn't quite as well lit as some of the stages that Bruce and Shelton have photographed. I had to stay around 1/60sec at ISO-200... and even then many shots were underexposed and had to be brightened in post-processing. ("Post-processing" is tech speak for "editing the photo after taking it.")

Speaking of post-processing, I explored a new computer program for doing so. Photoshop is great for getting one photo JUST RIGHT, but I took 469 photos for this project, and there will be more than a couple that I'm interested in fixing up. I needed a better "workflow". Aperture is now the program for me. It only took me a few hours to go through all the photos, rate them all from one star to five, and edit them all to the point that I could create a slideshow and output some low-resolution versions for my web site. Pretty slick.

I'll probably still use Photoshop now and then when I need some particularly heavy-duty Photoshop Magic to fix up a shot, and Aperture makes it easy to do just that.

This remarkable creature is called a Flame Skimmer. I was talking earlier about camouflage, but this guy flies in the face of all that. He's bright red in a green and brown pond. There's no camouflage here. Dragonflies are very often bright and shiny. Well, the males are anyway. The females tend to be brown and quite a bit more camouflaged.

According to Wikipedia dragonflies can fly between 30 and 60 km/h (19 to 38 mph), which ranks them as the fastest insects on the planet. Also, I've seen them change direction so fast it'll make your head spin. Yes, these guys really don't have to worry too much about hiding.

The "skimmer" family of dragonfly (Libellulidae, including the Widow Skimmer) are characterized by their large size and thick, fleshy bodies. I have observed that this family tends to land more often than those with the harder exoskeleton, such as the "darner" and "clubtail" families. I guess they just need to rest more often, but whatever the reason, it makes the skimmers MUCH easier to photograph.

This particular dragonfly exhibited another interesting behavior which worked to my advantage: He would take off, fly around for a while, and then land right back down in exactly the same spot. This behavior would not manifest itself over a long period of time, though, for when I went back to that same stick the next day, the Flame Skimmer was nowhere to be found. I've observed this behavior on several other occasions with a variety of dragonfly species.

Dragonflies are probably the most difficult animal I've ever photographed; but, like any other subject, I learn their habits and am better able to set up nice photos.

This shot was taken on Highway 88, the road up to Kirkwood. There's a turnout with a beautiful valley view. Lots of snow and trees and a little bit of a lake (though in the winter it's all covered with snow) on the south side of the road. I've seen lots of cars parked there, people outside shooting the landscape. The beauty I saw is on the other side of the road. Here's where CalTrans (or whoever) dug away at the mountain so there's a wall of rock which, very rarely, is revealed so that you can see the icicles forming as the snow melts and the water falls. The rest of the year, this wall is either covered with snow or completely bare.

Photography in the snow is not as easy as you might think. There are many things going for you (lots of light, beautiful scenery) but the fact is that there's TOO much light... well, actually it's just the wrong type of light. Up in the mountains there is less atmosphere to diffuse the sunlight, and at the same time, the snow and ice on the ground tends to reflect the light right back at you. You get very harsh light. Sharp light. LOTS of contrast.

Have you ever taken a photograph in the snow with a color camera, but when you look at the print, it looks black-and-white? There's SO much contrast in the mountains, it's VERY difficult to bring out any detail.

Let's think about this for a second. It brings up an interesting concept that I'd like to discuss: Dynamic Range. When you see things with your eyes, you have the benefit of pretty good dynamic range. Your eyes can see detail in shadows and detail in the bright areas, particularly if you sit there for a while and let your eyes adjust. Depending on how long you wait, your eyes can see a contrast ratio of tens of thousands to one. It can even see as great as a million to one, but you have to sit there for about half an hour.

A camera isn't that good. Generally digital and printed images only give you contrast ratio of a few hundred to one. If you're looking to buy an LCD TV or monitor, take a look at the advertised contrast ratio. If the product has a high contrast ratio, the blacks will look darker and the whites will look brighter. I've seen LCD screens with 1000:1 contrast ratio and higher. Not as good as your eyes, but it'll do for now.

Take a look at this shot. There's bright snow and there's dark shadows. Photoshop helps with that fantastic adjustment function called "Shadow/Highlight". With that, I can make the shadows lighter and the highlights darker. It's not as pretty as in person, but it'll do for now.