Michael Fuchs Photography

British Columbia has a lot more climate diversity than I once thought.  The lush coast and epic mountains are beautiful, but the drier inland valleys are also quite pretty.

It’s always special to see the desert in bloom.  It’s neat how the desert can be dormant for years and then explode into flowers when the conditions are right.

I took this photograph in a beautiful green forest near timberline on the southwest side of Mount Saint Helens.  It’s odd to think that the opposite side of the mountain was completely blown away and turned into a debris flow in the 1980 eruption.  I wonder what it was like in this forest during the eruption.

I took this photograph of giraffes feeding on thorny acacia trees near the Tanzania/Kenya border on the west side of Kilimanjaro.  Giraffes are really odd animals.  From a natural selection standpoint, the way that giraffes and acacia trees developed together makes sense, but looking at them as if for the first time, giraffes are quite bizarre.  When visiting Africa, you almost start feeling like you are in a Dr. Seuss book.  The sizes, shapes, colors, textures, and proportions of animals are really odd when you sit back and think about it.  Such a cool world we live in.

I took this picture of a forest stream bank along the coast in central California.  I like the image because it has a nice contrast between the complicated detail of the static stream bank and the almost featureless fast-moving water.  I’ve taken photographs at this particular place quite a few times over the years.  This particular stretch of stream has a nice feel to it.

Sadly, the large number of inexpensive consumer drones available has made low level aerial photography a bit ubiquitous these days, but I still very much enjoy taking aerial photographs by hand from manned aircraft.  I like that you can see all the variations in a landscape that are not obvious from the ground.  I love the patterns and geometry when looking down from overhead.  There sure is a lot of variety in this world.

It’s surprising sometimes how precarious life can be.  Sometimes a whole ecosystem can be just 30 feet wide.  I took this photograph at Heron Reef in the Great Barrier Reef just off the coast of Gladstone, Australia. The coral only lives at a specific depth were the light is strong enough, but it is always covered in water during low tide and protected from wave damage.  To the left, the cliff drops down to the depth of the surrounding sea. To the right, the water depth increases again to the inner protected water of the coral cay.  In-between those depth extremes, is a thin strip of abundant life.  Not too deep, and not too shallow; just right.

Just some flowers tonight.