This is a retrospective of sunrise, sunset, or at least late afternoon images I’ve taken in the last 8 years or so. Sunsets and so on are another tired subject. Deal with it.  The sun is not in all of them, but all of them were taken at twilight times. I know this post is a little long but it is the best of all such images I have shot since 2001.

Kitakuni area, Okinawa

Grand Canyon National Park

The Masai Mara, Kenya

Petrified Forest National Park

Laguna desert, overlooking the Salton sea

Scripps beach, southern California

New York City

Looking towards the Denali area from over the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, while on a research flight

Siberia, from another flight

About 30 feet under, Kerama islands, Japanese Ryukus

Underwater off of Okinawa, at about 50 feet

Kyoto

Tokyo

Baja, Mexico

Somewhere in CA

Rocky mountain national park

Point lookout state park, Maryland

Rocky mountain National Park

Orvieto, Italy

Kaneohe, Hawaii

Sears tower, Chicago

Death Valley

Mount Baker as seen from Anacortes island

Vancouver island, BC

Arches national park

Monument valley

St. Louis

Wupatki National Monument

Lowell Observatory

Pictures of seagulls are a pretty tired photographic subject, but I like these.  Deal with it.

Here are some jellyfish I saw at the Monterey Aquarium a couple of years ago.

This one I saw during one of my irst dry suit dives.

We visited the north rim of the Grand Canyon recently.  From Flagstaff the south rim is only 1.5 hours away.  It’s only 10 miles across the canyon to the north rim, but it’s a 215 mile, 5-hour drive to get from the south rim  to the north rim lodge.  For this reason it only gets 10% of the visitors that come to the canyon each year.

The drive was memorable.  Leaving Flagstaff’s heavy forest of ponderosa pine, we soon passed through a transition zone of scrubby oak trees, then shrubs mixed with cactus, and finally into a barren and blasted desert. Continuing north, we went through the painted desert, whose magnificent cliffs frame the Colorado where it arrives from Utah.  At that point the river has cut an impressive symmetrical canyon that is of interest in itself, yet it pales in comparison to “the” Grand Canyon.  Vermilion cliffs national monument forms breathtaking scenery for the westward portion - it looks like mars.  A sudden rise in altitude, along with hairpin turns in the road, brings you through a small transition zone like Flagstaff’s, then abruptly into the ponderosa forest.  This forest - the Kaibab - is thicker and wilder than the Coconino forest around Flagstaff.

The north rim is more enjoyable than the south rim, because there are far less people, less development, more trails and less roads.  Pretty much everything about it is better!  The one exception is the long drive from Flagstaff.

I’m going to break this up into sections, because there are too many images to put in one post.  First, let’s do plants & animals.  I didn’t really get a lot of them, being so sick for most of the time (I had a wonderful case of food poisoning).  Plants sit still and are easier to approach… so there are more of them.  Luckily, I can go back pretty easily.

You can see from these that the north rim is more lush and heavily forested than the south rim.  This is a picture taken by my brother-in-law David; that’s me in the lower left corner.

There are beautiful meadows in the Kaibab forest around the rim.  We arrived within the blooming season, but if you come too early or too late, you will not see this kind of thing.  But if you time it just right, there are flowers everywhere.  Because of the flowers, there are hummingbirds everywhere; they are as common as starlings on the east coast, and much more common than robins.  Although you can hear them constantly, they are hard to see because they are so small and fast.  Crows and ravens are also everywhere up here.

BTW, this is really what is looks like - no color saturation enhancement here!

The forest around the rim has been heavily damaged by fires in the last ten years or so.  It seems as if half of the forest burned down.

All of the images above and more are included in the gallery below.

The grounds at Lowell are filled with Hummingbirds.  They are broad-tailed hummers, a species not found on the east coast, although they look almost identical to the ruby-throated hummers found on the eastern seaboard.  They have a distinctive metallic “churr” as they fly.  They are bold and extremely territorial, and will not hesitate to swoop down on a person in order to chase them away!

This guy always perches on the same branch of the same tree, where he periodically asserts his dominance by making fantastic flights up to high altitudes before plunging at high speed almost to the ground in great, looping dives.

In the scenic image, you can just barely see him at the center, a miniature bird-shaped dot.  These animals sooo tiny.

After completing my dive on Thursday, I drove across the state to visit with my Dad & his wife Sue, who have a place on the west coast in Estero (a suburb of Fort Myers).

We visited the Audobon Corscrew sanctuary, which has a 2.5 mile boardwalk through it.  Because of the boardwalk, and the fact that people can’t easily stray from it, I think the animals are particularly at ease here.  Of course, I didn’t have a good camera with me.  We saw all kinds of animals at close range.  It’s a birder’s paradise.

A brown anole, a very common sight in Florida.

A barred owl, roosting 10 feet from the walkway and completely at ease.

Another place we visited was the Lover’s key park.  It has great beaches, the fish are leaping out of the water, and there are osprey nests around.

My last day of diving this week was a Thursday with threatening weather out of the south.  I decided to dive the BHB (Blue Heron Bridge, see here and here) solo, and stay on the east side in 20 feet of water.  There weren’t too many people there.  I decided to work the east side under the low bridge, because of the wrecks underneath the bridge and all of the animals that can be found within.  I’d heard something about seahorses, and hoped to find some myself.

I entered the water about 20 minutes before slack high tide, which was 2:12 PM. Now that’s an easy schedule!  For some reason the board near the water’s edge had a high tide time of 2:30 posted; check some tables if you’re making plans.  The water temperature was 72, air temp about the same.  Using a 3mm suit and a hood, it was doable, but I was pushing it. Visibility was about 20″, but when the current changed at the end of my dive - about an hour and 15 minutes later - the vis dropped to less than 10 feet over less than five minutes.

A lot of the best photo opportunities can be found in the shallow sand leading up to the channel under the bridge, in only 8-12 feet of water, just where the slope rolls off into the 20″ region.  You are supposed to tow one of those damned surface markers here, and I did - but none of the 10 other divers that I saw were using one.  WTF?  It’s a pain to tow one because they can get tangled with fishing lines from people fishing off of the bridge, and it is one more thing to handle when you’ve got a camera.  Between handling the float, the camera, standard dive safety things, trying not to blunder into other divers in the murk and sometimes low vizibility, and remembering not to dive near the swimming beach - there’s a lot to keep in mind here.  Luckily, it’s so shallow, and so close to shore, that it doesn’t strike me as a particularly dangerous place to dive.

First, as always around BHB, the ubiquitous arrow crab.

Juvenile Gray Angelfish.  This animal will grow up to have a very different coloration; see the animal in the background in this image.

Flounders are miraculous creatures.  They are invisible until they move, and then they are graceful as they swim with a rippling motion.  This”eyed” flounder - funny name, given that they all have eyes - is almost undetectable, blending in with the sand and broken shells on the bottom.

Under the bridge it is like a spooky underworld cathedral.  The bridge’s columns march into obscure distance and indistinct blue light.  Although it is the Lake Worth lagoon - a stretch of sea water protected by a barrier island, and fed by fresh water too from a number of sources - it might as well be the river Styx.  The bodies of several small sailboats lie under the bridge, swathed in continual gloom and watched over by large schools of spadefish.  The schools can be so large that on occasion, as they flow around you, it can be disorienting, like flying through a flock of mirrors.  The presence of a large school appearing out of the misty darkness can be a little frightening, as it first seems to be the body of an enormous animal.  The bottom, particularly under the wrecks, teems with otherworldly life.  A five-foot southern stingray, looking like a fleshy stealth fighter, rippled from the nothingness beyond my line of sight and, upon seeing me, spun on its axis and disappeared into the haze, followed by a retinue of remoras.  Had it been a vision?  I knelt on the bottom and stared at the activity, awed and soaking in the spiritual moment.  Photography was superfluous.  Overhead, cars rumbled over the bridge, oblivious to the world below.

A bright plastic object - a fishing lure - distracted me.  Surrounded by a cloud of fish, it was being gigged up and down by its owner 25 feet overhead on the bridge sidewalk.  The fish were nibbling at the attached piece of squid, getting some meat but not taking the hook.  The fisherman had no idea what he was up against; a small army of animals with miniature tweezer mouths and lighting reaction times.  I was having trouble seeing it - and it was only 5 feet away; I was also shivering.  Time to go back!  Total dive time: 72 minutes, and only 1/2 of my air consumed.

Today I hooked up with a great guy I met on Scuba board.  Joe brought his friend (relative?) Lev and we all went in together.  Joe was kind enough to loan me a cylinder and some weights, the only things I don’t travel with.  Joe is clearly an old hand at the bridge and scuba, so was a natural dive leader.  For 75 minutes we dove the west side in water that never exceeded 13 feet and was a tolerable 74 degrees.  After all that time, I’d consumed only 1600 PSI of air (about half a tank).  That’s another wonderful thing about this site - endless bottom time, little danger.

The ocean has been disturbed by wind lately, so the vis was kind of bad.  You can see how many particles are in the water; it was only possible to take photos of things that were very close to the camera.  Some animals don’t like that!

I’ve written about BHB (as it’s known locally) once before because I dived there last year.  BHB is one of the easiest and most rewarding dive sites in this region.  It’s underneath a bridge on the east end of West Palm Beach.  There is a park - Phil Foster park - there, with bathrooms and showers.  Nothing could be simpler.  Dive up, park your car, gear up on a picnic table, and wade in.  There are only two gotchas:

1) Everyone else thinks that BB is great too.  There’s nothing like diving with, say, 200 of your fellow divers.

2) It’s only good for diving at slack high tide - the period just after high tide has finished coming in when the water i fairly still.  Otherwise, there is too much silt from the fresh water draining into the sea, and the visibility will be terrible.  Not to mention the current, which will carry you away.

To deal with these issues, we went on a Monday afternoon 20 minutes prior to slack high tide.

Here are the resulting photos:

This barred blenny is only about one inch long and is like a little fairy, because it has tiny little “antennas” (called cirri) and it pops in and out of hiding holes.  It’s adorable and fun to watch.  It will swivel its eyes paranoically at you and then instantly disappear, although the cirri will sometimes stick out of its hole.

This seaweed blenny reminds me of the dramatic gopher:

Red-tipped fireworm

Bearded fireworm.  I don’t know if they’re named “fireworms” because they are colored so brightly, or because they can sting (both are true).

Small yellow stingray, family Urolophidae

Crabs mating (blotched swimming cabs).  If disturbed, they will scuttle away together, locked in position.

One of the arrow crabs that are so abundant in this area.

A sharpnose puffer runs away; a gray angelfish is in the background.

I finally caught up with that sharpnose puffer, although it’s still pointed away from me…

A lantern bass;  it resembles a tiny grouper.

I kid you not, this juvenile wrasse is called a “slippery dick,” Halichoeres bivittatus.

Recently we had a snow & ice storm that coated everything with a beautiful gloss.  My cat, Sita, is always trying to escape to the great outdoors, so I thought “You want out?  Ok, you can have it.”  Holly took her outside and dropped her on the ice about 30 feet from the door.

Sita didn’t like it.

She rocketed back inside with no hesitation.  Hopefully, learning occurred.

This is Sita.  Sita watches TV.  She’ll become engrossed in something, a bus accident in this case, and you can see her head move back and forth as she follows the action.  Sita is the kind of cat that likes bus accidents.  In fact, I’m sure she’d really like gladiatorial combat to the death; she’d like to be one of the wild beasts that rips apart innocent Christians.