Traveling to Seattle, a friend and I went to the John Bastyr School for one of their health and herbal festivals. A nature walk through the forest next to the campus intrigued me. It was incredibly informative, discussing how to use plants in the wilderness for medical treatments and health.
The Pacific Northwest forest was dappled with sunlight and the treacherous Devils Club hung over our heads at one point in trail. I worked around the group trying to get a good angle on the plant to capture the details with the strong backlighting.
The Devil’s Club is one that I’ve run into since a child digging around the forests of the Pacific Northwest, and trust me, this is one you do not want to stumble into. Called the Devil’s Club or Walking Stick, it can grow up to 16 feet (5 meters) tall in rainforests and damp environments to which Western Washington is well equipped. Spines are found not only on the stems but the leaves, making it a painful experience to touch in any way, even brush against.
According to our guide, Native Americans used Devil’s Club for medicine to treat diabetes, tumors, chapped lips, and tumors. It can also be used as an analgesic, though it isn’t as strong as traditional aspirin. It can be used in herbal teas and he said that they ate it as food. He didn’t clarify which part they ate, from the red fruits that form in clusters off stems that look like clubs, or from the leaves or root.
For me, this is a plant I’ve endured most of my life, having spent too many hours pulling its little thorn-like spines from by arms and legs and out of my dogs. Still, it is a magnificent examples of the unusual in the world. A plant I think of when I imagine what plant life was like during the dinosaur times.
I’m not a fan of funny email jokes (seen them 58 times before you did and emailed it to me), videos, and other virtual time wasters. But this one had me going for over an hour. I emailed the graphic to a bunch of my RVing and outdoorsy friends and they are now having too much fun with it. 
Risk. Danger. Anticipation. And nerves of steel. These are the thrills and spills of photographing water droplets. There is a constant threat of danger as they dangle, so close to the edge, hanging on until the last second…then splat. Gone. 
Water droplets form from rain and condensation. In nature, they tend to cling to the fine hairs and fibers of plants. They line up in rows along 
Any wind or motion around or against your subject will usually knock the water droplet off. The heat of your body can cause wind on cool days, shaking the water droplet. This is especially true when 
Water droplets are found hanging from edges and nestled in leaves and flowers, held there like water storage tanks for as long as possible, feeding and cooling the plant at the same time. 
The other method is to photograph the view through the water droplet. The water droplet shrinks the background so we see it clearly, though slightly distorted. It isn’t necessary that we see the whole background since it is inside of the droplet, but it helps to see just enough of an echo of the background to add to the sensation that we are viewing the world beyond through a secondary lens beyond our camera.
Determining the aperture and depth of field for the photograph of a water droplet is a challenge. The focus is on the water droplet. What is in focus in front or beyond is part of your creative decisions. If the background is too much in focus, you might lose the water droplet in the picture. If it is too much out of focus, the echo of the background in your image might distract more than echo. A good background perspective choice is to echo the view inside of the water drop, not overwhelm it.
In the two comparison photographs here, you see that one has more depth of field, so the grasses are visible as lines even though they are still out of focus. The other, vertical image, has a much more narrow depth of field, so the background grasses blur into a soft color behind. We know they are grasses, so it doesn’t matter that we can’t clearly see them. We see them in the water droplets, and get the “impression” they are grasses, so our mind fills in the blank. 
Using the natural light coming in from the sliding glass doors of our living room, we photographed these water droplets on the stem of a flower, with the flower behind it echoing the image inside of the water droplets.
The stem was held in place with the weight of a lamp in front of the camera on its tripod. We spritzed water onto the stem until we formed a good looking water droplet. You can also use clear glycerin to fake a water droplet. The thick liquid will stay longer and have less chance of falling, too.
As we worked, Brent noticed that the process of spraying the water on the stem caused water droplets to sit in the window screen next to the camera, forming many water droplets reflecting the view of the backyard inside of them. He moved the flower behind the window screen and instantly saw dozens of flowers in the water droplets. He played with fill flash and natural light and bracketed across apertures to get the final image here.
Could it be that global warming is not a unique experience? That changes in the the weather have occured for millenium and we are just catching up?
When you think of Alaska, don’t you imagine it as the last refuge for large wild animals in the Northern Hemisphere? A place where elk, caribou, moose, and bear still wander wild and free? On our first trip to Alaska, we were sure we would return with film covered with all things wild and woolly.
After a week of sneers and stabs, we called a truce. “We’re in Alaska!” I shouted, “Who cares about anything else!”
A few days later we did find some moose and bear, but by then we were relaxed and more casual about the event, ready with our cameras, our attitudes in place. We returned to Seattle with glorious images of snow-capped mountain scenes, icebergs floating on Portage Lake, fall colors on the tundra of Denali, brilliant red high bush cranberries glistening with water droplets, fascinating patterns of trees and plant life, and a few bear and moose pictures, along with a lot of Arctic ground squirrels. We returned happy, the most important thing.
Before we knew it, we pushed those self-imposed limits and started “seeing” things differently through the equipment we had instead of regretting what we didn’t have. Brent dusted off his wide angle lens and started “seeing” the world through an even wider perspective. Stuck with only one tripod, we propped our cameras up on the floor, benches, window sills, and anywhere, using coats, hats, and tour guide books to aim our lenses for long low-light exposures.