From one vacation to another. I've been so bad about blogging for so long that I have a big backlog of photos that could be blog-worthy. Here are a couple bighorn sheep photos from last summer's vacation to the Black Hills and Badlands in South Dakota. 

Western South Dakota is one of my favorite places in the world.

We walked on the pier every night we were there. It is the second longest pier on the eastern seaboard.

Dolphins

To some extent, everyone gets a little desensitized to their surroundings. So, as a midwesterner, I can't imagine just how cool it would be to be able to sit out on your porch and watch dolphins feeding on fish in the salt marsh.

Sunrise

Here is another attempt at shooting a more or less sunless sunrise on the South Carolina coast. I'm pretty happy with this one.

I think these are called sea oats.

Angel Oak

While in South Carolina, we visited the Angel Oak tree. One place said the tree was about 500 years old. Another said it was about 1500 years old. I don't know which is right, but I do know that it is spectacular.

A couple footprints caught my eye on my vacation. This one is pretty typical.

This one is the track of a loggerhead sea turtle coming ashore, laying its eggs, and then returning to the ocean. It was neat to see the tracks. They were big and reminded me of tractor tracks a little bit. It would have been really cool to see the turtle. They are big turtles, weighing several hundred pounds. The big ones can weigh as much as 1000 pounds.

My mom loved the color blue.

Like all good moms, mine liked all of my photos. Well, most of them anyway. But there was one that she really liked. It was a photo I shot years ago in Yellowstone at sunrise. It wasn't the dramatic, beautiful, colorful sunrise that you'd expect from a place like Yellowstone. It was a quiet photo. The sun was lost behind heavy cloud cover that day. It was just some trees and a lake and some sky. The only color in the photo was blue. At the time I was disappointed that the sun didn't show up for sunrise that day, but this photo has aged well. I still like it.

I'm really bad about making prints and sharing my photos, but I made a print of this one for my mom. She had it hanging in her office until she retired, and then she had it at home. When I was in South Carolina for vacation recently, I got up every morning for sunrise. Sometimes the sun showed up. Sometimes it didn't. One morning when the sun failed to show, I shot this photo. It reminds me a little bit of that photo from Yellowstone. It's simple, and it's blue. I don't know if it will age as well as the one from Yellowstone or not, but right now, I like it.

I wish I could show it to my mom.

A few more pictures from my vacation. I got up for sunrise every morning. The sunrises weren't the best, but I got some ok pictures. It's also really really nice to be up at that time of day, alone on the beach listening to the waves and the wind...