Photo Challenge: Light Shines in the Darkness

The light from above, streaming down through a forest canopy, will always stop me in my tracks and capture my attention.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it.

–John 1:5

A few words  apropos for a troubled time in the United States.

Photo Challenge:  Shiny 

 

Huron National Forest, Michigan

Hartwick Pines, Michigan

Tacquahmenon State Park, Michigan

Photo Challenge: How Dull…Not to Shine in Use!

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

 

Photo Challenge:  Shiny  

Crane & Son

While hiking through a local park, I came upon this pair lounging in the bush (the mother is out of the frame).  Since crane parents tend to be quite protective, I took this pic with a telephoto.

Kensington Park, Michigan

 

Photo Challenge: Winter’s Elements–“Cruel and Fierce Storms”

Would you believe the elements of a Michigan January: Earth, Air, Water & Frozen Water?

As I read in a colorful legal opinion from long ago, “They that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places . . .”

Photo Challenge:  Elemental   

Fleming Creek, Michigan

Newburgh Lake, Michigan

Numinous

Afternoon sunlight finds a gossamer passage through the forest, creating a numinous presence along a slender brook.

Photo Challenge: Water’s Texture Like Capricious Emotions

 

The texture  of water is no more constant than the spectrum of human emotions.   In a wild river, it can be rough and raucous.  While in a northern lake, its surface can reflect the summer sky as if the still water were a mirror.  And then there are those streams where water’s texture can evoke the whimsical on a warm afternoon.

 

Photo Challenge:  Texture    

Tacquahmenon River, Michigan

Au Sable River, Michigan

Photo Challenge, Texture: Fur, Fuzz, & Feathers

The natural world displays a constantly changing array of textures.  In the individual life, from egg to adult, from fuzz to feathers.  And in the evolutionary tale, variations including feathers and fur.

 

Photo Challenge:  Texture