Blog
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Tired Places in Old Madison
Madison, Alabama, has a cute little historic downtown. It’s not large—only a block or two long—and although it looks fresh and well-manicured, if you stray even a short distance beyond that immediate area there are a lot of structures that have been abandoned or neglected. It’s entirely predictable where I ended up. The building above…
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Shady Shores
A few months ago I posted about our visit to the Alabama gulf coast, in particular Gulf State Park and the birds I photographed in the area. One day while we were driving back to our hotel, I spotted the brightly multi-colored building featured here. I didn’t stop then, but made sure to go back.…
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Desoto State Park
For the next few weeks I am going to circle back to Alabama and fill in a few entries that got squeezed out by the Yorkshire trip. We’ll start with Desoto State Park in far northeast Alabama. The part is divided into two disjoint pieces: the main section with the campgrounds (where Google Maps will…
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Yorkshire Pudding
Well, this is the final installment of my Yorkshire 2025 blog series. The previous seven posts have each corresponded to one day of photography. This wrap-up post gives me a chance to include an assortment of images that I did not include along the way. (There are also a few that I have featured at…
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Fountains Abbey
My last day photographing in Yorkshire was spent at Fountains Abbey, founded by Benedictine monks in the year 1132 and closed in 1539 by Henry VIII (along with all other monasteries in the country). It’s clearly worse for the wear after nearly 500 years, but spectacular, and well worth a lot more time than I…
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Off the Pavement
We’ll start this week’s set of images with a few that feature limestone pavements. I talked about these a few weeks ago, too, so I won’t repeat that discussion here. For someone who has lived and photographed in the desert southwest of the US, these formations are both foreign and fascinating. They don’t have the…
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Yorkshire Day 5
After saying in last week’s post that I do not take as many shutter speed variations of moving water as I should, here is a counterexample where I took eight separate images ranging from 1/8 second to 1/250 second. Typically, I might take two: a fast one and a slow one. It’s really a question…
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Fields, Forests, and Falls
We have now reached the midpoint of my time photographing in Yorkshire: Day 4. This day was, for the most part, my second pass through the areas shown. The weather and light was not the same, of course, but it was my second chance to compose images in most of these locations. The two images…
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Yorkshire Rivers and More
This week I will take a break from the dry stone walls to share (mostly) more detailed views from Yorkshire. The image above is of Cauldron Falls on Walden Beck (“beck” being a northern English term for a stream). The falls were nice, but using my crazywide-angle 9mm lens results in a completely different look…
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A Sunny Day in Yorkshire
My second full day in Yorkshire was sunny with some scattered clouds—an all-around nice day for photography, although the light was a little harsher than I would like for waterfalls. I have quite a few images of the River Ure from the vicinity of Aysgarth Falls, but decided to include this one because the shape…