November 23, 2019. It’s official name is “Cloud Gate.” Everyone calls it “The Bean.” It has become the iconic Chicago experience. I go to Chicago several times a year. It began with opera, but now I go as much to hang out with my Chicago photographer friends, all of whom I met through the now defunct social media platform Google+ and its several spin off organizations. Unless the weather is truly nasty, my trips to Chicago produce lots of photographic raw material to work with. Without doing the count, I would guess that of the photographs I submit to juried…

September 21, 2019. A new thing! I was the featured speaker at a 2-day retreat for Episcopal women at Camp Hardtner in central Louisiana. My 2-part presentation: Creation Considered: Encountering Creatures as a Spiritual Practice. Before breakfast the second day, a handful of the women joined me to venture out for a short walk. We didn’t go far, but we didn’t need to. This universe is filled with ordinary wonders: a mama wolf spider carrying a boatload of tiny babies clinging to her abdomen, a caterpillar of the gulf fritillary butterfly feeding on a passionflower vine, a late-blooming purple aster,…

August 1, 2019. Our penultimate day on the Osa Peninsula was spent on the Sierpe River. Words fail me… or so it seems, but, in fact, I have posted about this experience several times already: To see the river from the air, go here. And for a more reflective post after returning home, check out this. Yet scanning through my several hundred frames shot that day, I could tell many more stories about the Sierpe River. But one stands out, in part because the emblematic photo from that encounter has been accepted and a framed print will soon be on…

July 28, 2019. So,,, I’m sitting in Corner Coffeehouse in West Monroe, La., drinking black Costa Rican coffee and reveling in re-visiting a true highlight of my year. And…. since I arrived in Costa Rica in late July and left in early August, I get to do TWO posts about it! Wohoo! I went to the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rican with a handful of other photographers for a wildlife photography workshop organized by Out of Chicago™. And although I have long done a lot of creation photography… wild monkeys in their natural habitat? Not so much. I learned a…