My wife’s family has a long history of visiting Disney World, and I’ve now been more times than I can count. Disney’s Animal Kingdom is a special treat for zoo lovers for both the number of amazing animals and the quality of their enclosures. The gorillas occupy a vast hilly area with lots of room to move and separate areas for the male bachelors and the females. One of those enclosures opens up to a windowed area where it’s possible to see them up close, sometimes really close.

I mentioned when I posted my previous photo of this same pedestrian bridge that I had two other versions I would share in the future. Here’s version #2 (I’ll post #3 sometime in the future as well). It’s rare that I can’t decide between different versions of my photos – usually one is “right” and the others aren’t. With this photo, I’ve found things I like in each of the three.

Visiting Scotland in 2012, I loved the combination of old and new. I especially liked this view of Inverness Castle, shrouded in scaffolding, rising above the modern buildings with their shops and apartments below. In the foreground, the incredible Young Street Bridge radiates bright pink energy that welcomes you to an Inverness that is probably very different today than in 1836 when the castle was last rebuilt (or 1057 when it was first built).

The weather had been wild on our drive to Vermont. Thick angry clouds loomed in the sky while incredible rainfall pounded the car and flooded the surrounding fields. The Mad River was rising over its banks, and the highway patrol had closed VT-100 between Hancock and Granville because of high water. With no cell service, we had to use my Garmin GPS to plot an alternate route through the green mountains on back roads. We were incredibly tired by the time we arrived in Waitsfield, but then the weather started to clear and a little bit of sunlight peaked out in the gloom.

Vermont is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I have always found the sunsets there to be magical. On this summer trip in 2013, I was out and about scouting for a photo during the sunset hours – trying to find that miraculous combination of subject and background. I took several in different spots around this area northeast of Stowe, and it wasn’t until I stumbled across this farm equipment that I finally found my photo.