Whitman County, Washington is in the heart of the Palouse.

Have you ever heard of the Palouse? It’s an area in southeastern Washington and neighboring Idaho, and by some accounts, Oregon. It is a landscape of rolling loess hills. At a loss about loess? Loess is a soil made up of wind-blown silt and dust. The important thing is with enough rain it makes for productive grain and legume farming. And more recently canola farming. Rolling hills, spring green grains, and yellow blooms of canola cover the Palouse in curves, lines and colors. We spent some time there this spring and found the countryside an area of incredible textures. And you know we love textures. Hope you enjoy a few postcards from the Palouse.

Verdant waves of grain describes much of the Palouse in the late spring. But there is another, bold color in the Palouse palette, canola.

Wheat + Canola + rolling hills = Palouse Spring

As we post this, the grain has matured and the canola seed ripened and big machines in spring green and sunset red are crawling across the fields harvesting the crop. More lines and textures that we will have to go back for. Not this summer, but, hopefully, soon there will be more postcards from the Palouse.

Want to see an image in its own window? Just click the image.

Boyd TurnerJuly 26, 2026Comment

Landscape of Texture

Valley of Fire State Park is not very far from Las Vegas (by Nevada standards). It is famous for its red rock landscapes. The park could be a metaphor for Las Vegas: a flashy, brightly colored landscape below a blue desert sky but with a gritty and complex ecosystem under all the flashy red. We were captivated on a recent trip by the textures in this jumbled home of spectacular erosion. So we stripped out the color and doubled down on the textures. It was a gamble, but we think we found some interesting images in the grand buffet of Valley of Fire State Park. We hope you enjoy the feast.

Viewing note: These images are “letterboxed”. If you click (or tap) on the image it should open into a new window resized for your screen.

Boyd TurnerMay 29, 2026Comment

Antigone on the Platte

No, not the ancient Greek myth of a maiden turned into a crane. But the story of Antigone canadensis, the sandhill crane. We join the tale of the sandhill crane along the Platte River near the sandhills of Nebraska. Here the Platte River carries water from the Rockies as a broad meandering stream filled with many sandbars. Every spring the cranes gather with friends and family on the bars to rest at night, reaffirm old pair bonds, and then fly out to the adjacent river valley during the day for some fast food before leaving town for nesting in the far north. With a few friends. Like 500,000 to 1,000,000 friends. (Sounds like spring break on the Gulf coast.) It is an event. We made it to Nebraska at the tail end of a very dry and warm winter (March 2026). There were not as many birds as some years. But there were a lot.

The early spring mornings and evenings are filled with these gray versions of Big Bird. It’s easy to be fascinated with sandhill cranes. They have a unique voice that seems unchanged from their dinosaur ancestors. The sound of 10’s of thousands of birds making their odd croaking/gurgling cries is something that has to be experienced to appreciate. They have a large yet somewhat goofy but stately presence; to an American eye, somewhat like the King of England. Hundreds of thousands of goofy, squaking birds - surely there must be a photo or two to be made.

We took about 5,000 frames. Modern cameras capture frames at incredible rates. We would have needed over 130 rolls of film for those pictures. And now after having returned home, collated, culled, edited, polished we found some images from the Platte we like. So here are a few photos of life along the Platte River with Antigone during migration.

The mornings and evenings have large flocks moving away and back to the river. Often you hear the sound of the birds talking before you see the flocks rising above the trees or settling into the river. Smaller groups disperse into the fields to feed.

Sandhills are large birds and very elegant flyers. The wingspan of a big male can overlap that of a small condor.

On the ground they look somewhat goofy.

But in the evening, the large flocks are back in the air where they soar back to the Platte. Wings set. Legs and feet dropped like speed brakes. Croaking/gurgling (Crourgling? guroaking?) their ancient calls as they aggregate in large flocks on the sandbars of the Platte.

We hoped you enjoyed this brief look at the sandhill crane migration on the Platte. The cranes are incredible birds. We hope you see some on your travels around North America. And if you find yourself in Nebraska in late spring stop in Kearney. For the birds.

Boyd TurnerMay 14, 2026Comment

Sprites of Spring

Sprite: a spirit, a mythical fairy like creature, particularly common in Western European folk tales. Or so says Google and its AI helper. With a drought in the western US this year, finding the colorful sprites of spring may be more difficult than usual. But since we are on the edge of the vernal equinox and the beginning of spring it seemed like a good time to go hunting through the forest of our photo archives for a few of these magical tricksters. We found a few that have the power to lighten our day. We hope they lighten your day too.

If you are having problems seeing the whole image try clicking on the image. It should open up in its own window on your screen.

Boyd TurnerMarch 19, 2026Comment

Flowers of Decay

What is a flower? There is, as you would guess, a very specific scientific definition. Specifically, we think of the colorful parts of plants that produce seeds. (See our stories on the Tulips of Keuykenhof.) And we refer to other objects, especially people, metaphorically as flowers or as flowering. But what about the structures of whole classes of life forms that grow and release reproductive “seed”? The reproductive organs of life forms that grow on dead organic material can be just as beautiful and even more mysterious. You might call them mushrooms. But we think they should be called flowers.

We hope you enjoy a brief saunter through some images of fungal fruiting bodies we have made that we find quite interesting, and even, flowering with beauty. Here are some flowers of decay.

Boyd TurnerFebruary 28, 2026Comment

Return to Disappointment

We recently added a new gallery: Return to Disappointment. This new gallery contains images that make a longer-form project. The project captures moments as storms batter the headland, Cape Disappointment, at the mouth of the Columbia River. The storm came to Cape Disappointment, bringing tumult, turmoil and chaos. We think it turned into a wonderful project. We look at the images and feel the sting of the rain, and the taste of salt. Most of these images were originally captured in early November of 2025 and we think the gallery lives up to the line: “when the gales of November come slashin”.

Even though the project is longer than most, we have some images that didn’t fit this story of storms so well and so were excluded from the project. But we think they are worth sharing. So here are a few more images from Cape Disappointment.

If you haven’t seen enough of our photography of Cape Disappointment, scroll down in this journal to the entry for April 18, 2022 entitled “Cape without Disappointment”. That entry contains some of the history of the Cape and some more pictures we love, from the mouth of the Columbia River at Cape Disappointment.

Boyd TurnerJanuary 28, 2026Comment

Seafoam

In September 2025 we had a project published in LensWork Magazine #173. The project was called Seafoam and it spun out of the journal story we called “The Churn” that we posted in January, 2023. You can scroll down to see the Churn article. The Seafoam project is about the foam that occurs as the ocean bashes plankton against the rocky shoreline of the Oregon Coast. You can view the Seafoam project at LensWork.com but there is a paywall and it might cost you a few dollars to see the project. If you are a photographer, we believe membership is worth every penny as there is a lot of good info and interesting work to view.

September 2025 was also the last time we posted here to our journal. That is much longer than we prefer between posts. Yes, we are fine, but we have been busy. We are working on some new projects that we hope to share soon. In the meantime, here are some images from the Seafoam project that were not in the Churn journal entry.

Boyd TurnerJanuary 2, 2026Comment

Bee mine

Bumble bees. They aren’t honey bees. Bumblebees have a much more fraught social life. (Everyone but this year’s queens die off before winter.) They aren’t meat bees aka yellow jackets; yellow jackets are aggressive little minions of the devil with mostly hairless, yellow and black bodies. Bumblebees are hairy all over. Carpenter bees have hairy thoraxes (upper bodies) and smooth bottoms. Bumblebees are rumored to be poorly designed for flight. But they are definitely flying around our garden this year. Here’s a few images of these bulbous pollinators. If you want to learn more, you can visit the Bumble Bee Watch website. We know, right? Who knew there was an organization dedicated to just bumble bees.

But let’s not forget that the humble not bumble, honey bee is the important pollinator of crops and also is striped yellow and black.

And just for comparison, here’s a member of the Devil’s supporting cast, direct from Hades, the all-around nemesis of woods people, the Yellow Jacket. And did you know their stinger is smooth so they can insert it, pull it out and sting you again? And they bite. Clearly the perfect example of a malevolent evolutionary path. At least they aren’t dressed in camo.

Boyd TurnerSeptember 29, 2025Comment

Time for a refresh

Sometimes the ol’ place just needs a little work. The Image Galleries of our site had not been re-worked in a while. So we pruned the galleries down to six: Animals, Cities, Clouds, Mountains, Plants without green, Streams. We replaced almost all the images in the galleries with images you probably haven’t seen. A few of our absolute favorites remain.

We hope to add new galleries more frequently. Maybe more like projects that are too big for a story here in the Journal. And we are thinking about adding occasional limited time galleries. In short, The Images section of this site is getting some extra love.

We hope you enjoy the refresh. You can let us know by sending us a comment.

Boyd TurnerSeptember 4, 2025Comment

A Glittering

We don’t know who created the various words for groups of animals. Some group names are just generic: a herd of deer, a flock of geese. But some are quite appropriate. Maybe none more so than a glittering of hummingbirds.

Here’s a selection from our files that proves a group of these tiny birds are truly a glittering.

Rufous hummingbird and showy milkweed. Oregon

Purple-throated mountain-gem (male). Costa Rica

Purple-throated mountain-gem (female). Costa Rica

We hope you enjoyed this small bouquet (also a word for a group of hummers.) If you wish to see any of these images larger, you can click on the image for a larger pop-up version.

A technical note: You will notice many of these images are from Costa Rica. The cloud forest there has a variety of birds that are spectacular. These Costa Rica images were captured in 2012. Since then processing techniques have improved dramatically allowing more of the full potential of the digital image to come through. This allows us to present images we thought were disappointing, in a manner more true to the light in which we originally saw them.

This freshly polished group of hummers, from Costa Rica, as well as the western US, are, we think, a truly glittering group.

Boyd TurnerAugust 3, 2025Comment