This is going to be great! 25 of the Best instructors (very honored to be one of them) bringing you the latest, greatest, and most importantly, most inspirational creative learning on the planet! Join us!!!

With the slight amount of wildfire smoke in the air, the orange was deep and rich bringing a different kind of drama to the storm. No need for any WB modification here, if anything, I toned it down in post as it was burning. You can see in the image below the intensity that was there if only for a short time. In the photo above just to give you a sense of scale, you can see the United 737 flight into MSO above the watermark. This is big sky country and getting out with a camera whether I catch the lightning or not is always fun and, gorgeous. And as it turns out, a perfect example …

Well, emerging from your chrysalis into a garage wouldn’t do so I moved it to safe place outside. I got Sharon and we stood there and watched it. That’s when I said, “gee, maybe I should photograph it?” Heck, I’m so well known for my macro work. Not! It was fun trying to get the shot as the butterfly slowly pumped open its wings and antenna as it swung in the slight breeze. It’s then I remembered why I’m not a macro photographer, things move. As it did though, those brand new scales on its wings glowed in the light and I got hooked. 878 photos later, I thought I’d better get back to work. But want a cool moment. I checked on it a couple of hours later to find it had flown off. It was very cool and rewarding to see more new life at The Ranch!

Heat Shimmer can occur anytime, any place and it will DESTROY your image quality to the point even AI can’t fix it! The bigger issue is, most photographers either don’t know about or recognize it when it happens. You might see it most often rising from a parking lot on a summer’s day. But it can happen with snow or as in this case, over the grass flats on Kodiak Island. I just got done convincing a photographer it wasn’t him nor his lens that produced his out of focus images. It was heat shimmer! There are two really good clues you can use until you recognize it happening. First, your camera has problems autofocusing. Next, the image looks out of focus in the viewfinder and you can’t make it sharp. In the video above, you will see waves of heat shimmer from foreground to background ripple through the video. That’s heat shimmer, the destroyer of image quality. It’s not the lens and it’s not you!