Nature is Our Guide. Photography is Our Permission.

This post is your sign: get outside. Take photos. GO.

There’s a lot to learn in life, but I’m lucky to have learned young that nature is something to be cherished.

My mother made sure to teach me that lesson without words when I was very young. No matter what, she always found time to bring me into nature. We’d walk for hours through fields of flowers, forest paths, and have picnics at the lake.

I remember the light and the warmth of the sun mostly. It filled me with a lightness that’s rare to find today within all the vitriol and chaos that invades our lives, no matter how hard we try to escape.

We keep scrolling or consuming, hoping to feel better. It’s never been easier to treat our depression with a hit of dopamine from the algorithm’s god-like powers.

We keep buying, thinking it will make us happy. It might even work… for just a bit.

But the true antidote, research proves, is just getting off our butts and find a way into nature.

So it was wonderful to get outside to Loess Bluffs in Missouri, just about 100 miles away from Omaha, to capture some wildlife and nature scenes (although everything is pretty much brown here…).

It was an easy decision to go due to the weather. We’re breaking records here in Nebraska, and it was nearly 65 degrees when I arrived.

I used the time to “practice” my photography skills as well. I needed to get back into photography shape with my OM SYSTEM cameras (OM-1 Mark II and OM-3). I have been using a bunch of other cameras recently, so my muscle memory with OM needed a workout.

I was rusty - my shutter speed a little too low sometimes - but the image stabilization was so good it saved me.

I photographed this guy at the last of the light. I was shooting at 800mm equivalent focal length, and the stabilization was incredible handheld.

As I photographed though, my memory kicked in, and pretty soon my cameras nearly disappeared.

It’s great using the OM-1 Mark II (one of the best wildlife cameras ever made) along with the OM-3 (a camera so good I call it “OPTIMUS PRIME”), side-by-side. The menus are nearly identical, and the autofocus systems are just as precise. Both are pretty much powerhouses, but with the 50-200 f/2.8 IS PRO and 300 f/4 PRO, they make me look good.

I’m not great at birds-in-flight, but these photos were done using continuous autofocus and bird tracking that’s impressive for a rookie like me, tracking these birds all the way through some chaos.

Beautiful stuff, but then the sound overhead starts to get louder… and then, I see this:

It’s impossible to convey the feeling of witnessing something like this. The sound of it is overwhelming. I stood in the shadow of hundreds of flapping wings, all moving together with incomprehensible precision.

I didn’t take as many photos as I would have usually - because I took some time to just sit on the ground and experience it all…

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I could have stayed at this spot for hours, but I needed to move on. The possibility of more to see is always alluring. It was getting darker…

I drove slowly with all the windows down, and the world moved slowly around me - always I was surrounded by the sound and songs of nature.

The light was shifting quickly. Sunset was coming, and I was in awe - the common beauty of a February sunset… wow.

Finally, the light dims.

The sun falls.

And I feel the coolness of night as I leave.

GO OUTSIDE.

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