Sometimes there are dry spells, sometimes months between interesting moments when you do nature photography.  After the Salmon spawning season last fall I have been experiencing one of those times.  Three months of rain nearly every day then a cold spell made it difficult to get out much in a time of the year when there often isn't much to shoot.  Even when there may be something out there you still need a good deal of patience. 

As fall approaches we wait for the first rains to help the water flow in the rivers along the coast of Vancouver Island. Here on the Island, the main species I like to photograph that benefit from this abundance are the Black bears….

Our winter trip took a bit of a turn to the east so that we could go to a boat show in Florida, after some fixes to the trailer in east Texas we made a bee line to Miami spent a week there and then quickly again started to head back west.

When it is time to run from the cold and rain the desert states seem like the perfect place to get back to sunshine and that dry heat.  That was the plan and for the most part we found a good amount of sun but for some odd reason the cold was still following us down from the north. 

Coastal photography, we have spent a great deal of time shooting on the east coast of the US when we lived in South Carolina.  The west coast is a different beast altogether.  Rocky coastlines, big waves crashing, fantastic tidal pools all make for very different shots and of course the fact that the sun goes down over the ocean instead of rising again makes shooting very different. 

I had a plan.  This plan was to reduce the amount of time I spend working in my real job (I am a physicist who migrated to the financial world to build computer software and systems for mathematical modeling).  If I did this right I would be able to take some long trips to do the types of photography I love in new places for extended periods.