Post Archive by Year

A bumble bee view of a California Poppy at the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve, Mojave Desert, California.

This fun technique is one I would like to play around with some more this winter.  What I do is put my smallest extension tube on a wide angle lens.  This now gives me the ability to focus very close.  I basically have the lens sitting in the flower, and I’m able to focus on portions of the flower that are a mere fraction of an inch from the front of the lens.  With certain wide angle lenses, I can actually focus on the front of the lens.Read More

Death Valley National Park, California.

Well continuing with the desert wildflower theme, here is a photo of Death Valley from the amazing winter of 2005.  Hard to imagine Death Valley with huge meadows of wildflowers, but this is what it was like that year.  Here are more Death Valley Photos.

I wanted to show the size of the desert candles from yesterday’s post – I needed a way to show scale, so I put my camera on self timer and sorta posed with the unique wildflowers. 

This is a pretty rare photo – not because it is hard to find desert candles, although it is – but it is more rare for me to be in front of the camera!

Desert Candle, Mojave Desert.

The Desert Candle has to be one of of the most unique wildflowers I have ever seen!  When back lit, the hollow shaft of these giant flowers exhibits a wonderful glow, they are really impressive.  I think they are fairly rare, I know I looked far and wide before finding a small patch in 2005, and its not like they are hard to miss!

Normally I love winter, but this year in Alaska we have had endless warm temperatures and rain – in the winter, rain is wasted precipitation in my opinion – it could be snow!  So I guess this spring like weather has got me thinking of spring wildflowers!