In 2013, when I was still living in Massachusetts, my mother came to visit to see the fall color. There were a lot of options for places to go, and after some research we picked out New Hampshire’s Kancamagus highway, a route that is world renowned for its fall foliage. We drove up together, along with my dogs, and decided on a hike to Champney Falls along the way.

Sometime you just wake up and want to take photos. That was the case in 2012 when I took this photo of the Plum Island jetty near Newburyport, MA on an early November morning. I recall having in mind a pretty sunrise, but I ended up getting a cloudy bluish-gray morning instead. Not to be deterred, I went on to take this photo of the clouds over the jetty, mirroring the sea below.

Last year I did a solo backpacking trip to Quartz Lake in Colorado’s South San Juan Wilderness. While there, I was fortunate enough to take an outstanding night photo showing Mars and the Milky Way together in the sky at the same time. The next morning, when I woke up, I was greeted by the sunrise bathing the mountains in a warm, pleasant glow. Sort of…

My work travel sometimes take me to the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles, but in the past I had never brought along my camera. My previous trips were always in the winter (or whatever passes for winter in LA), which meant shorter days and less opportunity to get out and watch the sunset. But on my recent trip in late-April, I knew I would finally have a chance to see the beach on a wonderfully sunny late afternoon.

Last November we took a scuba diving trip to the Maldives. While we spent most of the trip on a liveaboard boat, we did spend a little bit of time visiting a couple of the Maldives’ wonderful islands. One of those islands was Dhangethi, which is a popular stopover for liveaboards carrying divers and other tourists. Unlike many islands in the Maldives, Dhangethi is not a resort but rather is a home for the locals, and while it still has the usual souvenir shops found anywhere tourists go, it also has little streets with real homes and real people.