Cropping-
I usually crop a lot of extraneous clutter out of my photos. I also try to compose the image to avoid capturing much that is man-made. But that being said, most of the images are taken pretty close to cities and towns and many are taken fully inside the city limits. The image above was taken from my roof during a particularly photogenic storm. I left the cityscape in because I felt like it added something to the image. Beauty is where you find it, but you’ve got to look.
Photoshop-
I don’t own or use Photoshop or any other robust photo tweaking software. Some of the photos are edited in my Apple’s native Photos app to better represent to the true colors, yes. The photos are shot on my iPhone or the little Nikon, go into the iPad and get cropped and (sometimes) trued-up. That’s it.
Birds-
It has been noted that there are a lot of images of birds on this site. There are a couple of reasons for this. Let me explain. First, birds are (typically) the most numerous and easily seen wildlife people encounter on a daily basis. You don’t need to go to a park, live in a rural area, or put in much effort to see birds.
Second, there are thousands of species of birds- perhaps as many as 10,000 different species world-wide. By comparison, there are about 6,500 species of mammals. I understand that the planet supports nearly 1 million species of insects- and that leads me to the third reason.
Third, I like to look at birds. Sometimes they are beautifully colored, sometimes they are frustratingly similar looking, sometimes they look like dinosaurs, sometimes they don’t let you get a clear look at them. They are also vocal. I often hear a bird long before I see it. In fact, I heard the call of a Sora in a local wetland for a year before I was able grab a very poor quality photo of one. If you are into such things, birds are a game that can be played almost anywhere and almost anytime.
I try to mix up the images and post landscapes, skyscapes, plants, and members of the other Classes of organisms when I am able, but this site may skew a bit towards birds because of their prevalence.
Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Nature, every day. 