A couple of attempts at panoramics from my neighborhood in Brooklyn. I really can’t think of a place in the city that has better views than those just outside my apartment in Dumbo. For the top shot, I merged three HDR images into one (total of 15 exposures) and for the bottom I used 4 HDR images for a total of 20 exposures. Being a :3o second walk from my apartment, I’ve taken photos at this location several times but still haven’t quite gotten the shot I’m after. I’ll keep at it and post when I do.

Some sea otters are just cooler than others — like this guy that I photographed in Elkhorn Slough in the town of Moss Landing, California. I sat for about two hours at the end of a jetty watching the otters as they went about their business, slowly becoming habituated to my presence.

Not much to say here, just a couple of Canadian geese swimming past the reflection of a lighthouse. This one was taken last spring down in Cape May, New Jersey at Cape May Point State Park.

Here’s another one from my recent trip to the desert. Cholla cactus in the foreground and ocotillo in the background in Anza-Borrego State Park in southern California.

This will be the last post for about a week as I’m off on vacation tomorrow. As for the photo, it was taken in the Badlands a couple years back very early in the morning. I was out before sunrise to photograph prairie dogs when I saw this, and another pronghorn moving in and out of the desert sunflowers along the roadside.

Antelope Valley, about an hour and a half drive northeast of Los Angeles, is known as one of the best places in the country to view spring wildflowers. In particular, the California poppies. I arrived about a week or so late for the peak bloom, so decided to focus on individual flowers, rather than landscapes, to see what might be creeping around. I was photographing a beetle when I looked over and saw this caterpillar emerging from the bottom of one of the poppies.

I know… nothing exotic about a raccoon, but I’m an equal opportunity wildlife appreciator. At least this guy is keeping it real and isn’t a garbage raccoon like the ones most of you probably have in your backyards. He/she was searching for food (crabs, perhaps) in the swampy marsh areas around Merritt Island in Florida.

This is a greater roadrunner (not really sure what the Looney Tunes guys were looking at when they created the cartoon). Roadrunners can fly, but usually don’t, preferring to run across the ground at speeds of up to 15 miles per hour. They got there name due to their habit of emerging from the underbrush along roadsides and running parallel to cars before darting back to safety. I ended up with a chest full of cactus spines after chasing this guy around for about 20 minutes, continually dropping to the ground for eye level shots.

Here’s another one from last weekend in the desert. A couple of bugs attempting to make a few more bugs.

I got up early Sunday morning with a few hours left before I had to drive back to LAX for my flight back to New York. I was too far from any wildlife locations that I knew about so I just decided to check out the closest green area on the map to see what I could find . This brought me to Box Springs Canyon State Park and the Moreno Valley. The last thing I expected were hillsides full of wild burros. Apparently the Moreno Valley is the only place in the US where burros roam free on anything other than federal land. It’s believed that they were brought to the area from Death Valley by a cowboy some 50 years ago. The hills also happened to be covered in yellow flowers creating a nice foreground to shoot across.