Remember that you were one of the individuals making up the crowd that you're complaining about. Or should some people have more exclusive privileges to the public parks than others?

I can assure you, as a Californian, that Californian's have the same disdain for crowds as you do. But as more and more people are discovering the beauty in their own backyards, the parks are getting busier, which is the whole purpose of the National Park System. And I would bet that if you query the residents of the surrounding communities such as Springdale, Rockville and Hurricane, most welcome the influx of tourist since those towns exist primarily because of those same tourists (from around the country and the world, I might add).

Since I've retired, I've been to Zion more than 20+ times. Zion is a big park. Most of the visitors are located within about 100yds of the main roads, which is a tiny fraction of the park. If you want to enjoy the park and escape the crowds, do as I do and slap on a backpack and hike into the wilderness on one of the many easily accessible trails. It only takes a short while before you're the only ones out there and you get to see areas of the parks that most will never see.

Aside from your non-photography opine, That was a very nice image.

How many of you do what I do? I come downstairs in the morning, turn on the computer, make coffee, and spend several hours on UHH and other sites. Years ago, I would come downstairs and actually do things. I have seventy-eight items on my To Do List, but here I am at the computer. I found that this is more enjoyable than cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, or bringing garbage to the dump.

It's taken me a while, but I've figured out a way to justify this. "You only go around once in life." Do I want to spend it doing what I want or doing chores? The answer is obvious. The house is clean enough, no one has complained about my lawn, and the garbage situation is under control.

Now, back to my various websites.

It is easy to complain about crowds, and we really like it best when we photographers can position ourselves exactly where they want to get the best image of a scene.

But we also need to remember that each person in a crowd is an individual that would also like to have a great position to make a photograph, even a cell phone image. Additionally, keep in mind that there might be one individual in any crowd that is so taken with an experience at Zion or Canyons or Yosemite or other national park of monument, that they then go on to do something absolutely stunning based on that one moment in a crowded park.

Or, would it be better if no one ever went to our NPs and the government decided it was a waste of money to fund the National Park Service. So there are challenging trade offs and we can't have it our way, all the time.

Schreiner's commercial gardens here in western Oregon to be precise. My first visit. Learned about it from an article I read by George Lepp, titled something like "How to locate gardens for photography".

I spent an enjoyable 3 hours or so there, starting at 7:00am when they let photographers in early. Immense variety of flowers. I had difficulty narrowing down to a few to post.

Canon R5, first pass through the gardens with the RF 24-240mm lens, then changed to the RF 100-500mm once the bees started buzzing. That lens is perfect for flowers, or for zooming in close on the bees.

It was one of those days when everything was going well. I was remembering to check and adjust everything, trying a lot of options, the tripod, head and L bracket working great. I did forget to focus stack, but you should always leave one good reason to go back again!

One very unusual aspect of Varanasi is that those who know anything about it, tend to visualize it in two dimensions. When we think of Paris, or Vienna, or San Fransisco, we think of them as having some sort of depth. Even in the two dimensional representations otherwise known as photographs, we can see that they have depth; that we almost can walk into them. The play of light along the planes and the convergence of the lines of those planes all tell us that this place is actually solid. It’s real.

But not so with Varanasi. In any representation I have ever seen of Varanasi, my own included, it has been flat. A bunch of buildings, albeit very beautiful buildings, bathed in a golden haze, standing proudly along the banks of the Ganges River like a Potemkin village, a billboard, or a stage set. Your eye can follow the city from side to side, but cannot enter it.

But it does have depth. In fact, Varanasi is a fairly sizable city of between one and two million souls, not counting the many visitors, like my wife and me, who come to either celebrate at the river’s edge, or watch those celebrations from afar. It’s not a particularly pretty city. In my humble opinion, all the beauty that was put into it was reserved for its shoreline. But it is a substantial one with what I found to be a collection of very interesting residents. Here are some photos taken from within its streets ... after the sun has finished rising and its people go about their daily business.