Whenever we dive Duck Island at the Isle of Shoals, the seal interactions are always a surprise. Some days they keep a respectful distance and vanish the moment you turn around, while other days you get treated to an up-close show.

Our September 12 dive definitely fell into the second category.

Going through my archives, I ran across this wonderful Milky Way photo that I previously shared on Flickr but not here. I took this in July 2014 on a trip to visit family in Pagosa Springs, Colorado at a spot I’ve returned to several times. On this particular night, I got incredibly lucky with finding a location that so neatly captured the Milky Way in such a great orientation.

I love going back through my photo archives and finding things I haven’t shared on this website before, including this photo from a trip to Disney World in 2012. My wife and her family were Disney Vacation Club members, so we got to stay in a lot of great places near the parks when we visited. On this trip we were staying in either Boardwalk or Beach Club (I forget), and I brought my camera along to capture some evening Disney light magic. The blue hour light was perfect, and I was able to get a fantastic framing back towards the lighthouse and boardwalk with the yellow lights contrasting the blue sky.

In 2022, I took a short overnight backpacking trip to the Highland Mary Lakes in the Weminuche Wilderness near Silverton, Colorado. I didn’t have a lot of time, so I did a shorter loop with just a single night in the wilderness before hiking back out. But in that short trip, I was hit by a crazy afternoon monsoon and then treated to a beautiful, soft sunset that you only see on those days when there’s a lot of moisture in the sky. Perfectly Colorado!

Hello friends, it’s me, the human writer who technically owns this site and theoretically writes material for it. We all know AIs are now doing a lot of the writing in this world, and I have certainly been using AI a lot to do chores like “write me a blog post” and “build me a beaver simulator.” I will even admit that several of my last written posts on this site have been “assisted” by AI tools that probably deserve more credit, but so far I’ve held off on using AI to make generative edits to my photos. And that issue has brought me back to my keyboard, which I am actually typing on with my own human fingers and not letting some AI do the work. My photos are all hand-crafted by me, but does that still make sense in our age of AI wonders? Did it ever make sense? Let’s take a deep dive.