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Another shot from my recent trip to Matthiessen State Park.

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I've been wanting to update some of my older images from Matthiessen and Starved Rock State Parks that had been taken before I had as much of an understanding of photographic techniques, and before I had good equipment.

So, it's with that in mind that I embarked to Matthiessen State Park at 4am, to start with Giant's Bathtub. It was a beautiful day. The leaves still hang with the fresh green of spring, and the water was flowing at a decent pace, due to some recent heavy rains in the area.

If you have known me for any length of time, you will not be surprised to find that I did not settle for merely hanging out on the fringes of the water and creating the typical image, but waded in to the startlingly cold, murky, brown water.

I think that I managed to make several good quality images of the scene that might even be worth printing. Now it's time to go through some more images and see what else needs improving.

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I photographed this tree on a recent trip to Nicaragua this past spring. This image was created from a moving river taxi on the San Juan River, near El Castillo.

This is quite possibly the image that I have had the hardest time editing...ever. I've come back to it several times over the last few months, but I've never felt like I was able to realize its full potential.

The scene of this image was incredible. I had driven up to northern Door County, Wis; to Door Bluff County Park to get a taste of some real winter, since it never showed up in Illinois this year. I spent some time shooting this ice off of the tip of the Door Peninsula during the day, and then took some time to rest, and came back just before sunset. The sun dropped quickly and I scrambled to get some images of the ice and the sunset, which turned out to be a difficult task.

The dynamic range of this scene was rather large, not just in tone, but especially color. The shaded side of the ice turned to a deep blue, while the lighted sides of the ice turned an orangish-pink; reflecting the color of the sunset.

I attempted to process the image through HDR, but was unable to get a realistic feel to the image. This is the best that I could come up with. I still don't feel that it captures the incredible scene that I saw, but it's pretty good.