AWESOME SHOTS!! I remember my first trip to Colorado on Thanksgiving day in 1976. I started the morning driving up to a mostly frozen over Bear Lake trudging through the knee deep snow and having hundreds of birds thronging me for food. On my hike up to the lake I took some food with me and I ended up with several wild birds on my shoulder and others eating out of my hand. Your first photo brought back that memory. It was a cold winter as three days later we were driving my camper through the mountains along the old railroad track bed down into Cripple Creek when we spotted about 25 or 30 deer in the road which approached us so we stopped and my two children of 6 and 11 years hand fed the deer while standing on the back bumper with everything we had in our camper for over an hour. It included apples, carrots, bread and I can't remember what else. They were all skin and bone. I reached out and grabbed the antlers of an 8 point buck which he merely shook side to side and I let go. He never backed up but came forward to get his apple. from there through the mountains we went to Silverto and Uray and then Durango before heading north through Gunnison up to Yellowstone which was empty of people and the blizzard that had taken charge ended the day before we arrived. We camped for two days and caught brown trout for our meals and headed back east through South Dakota and then back to Florida. It was a memorable 2 weeks.

I'm Kennykorn and this is my first time looking at this Forum. I'm impressed at what I see so I figured I would try sharing a few photos taken about 3 days ago to learn how to post. For the record I live about 16 miles east of Tallahassee in North Florida. I'm a retired civil engineer that likes to play at photography on occasion. I've read a lot about photography but it has been a low priority in practice so 90 percent of what I have done were just snapshots with no effort in post processing nor do I own software for that purpose. My photos are more happenstance with some cropping and size reduction for posting purposes.

The attached photos are all of a 12" brown rough scaled lizard I captured while clearing trees away from the power lines along the edge of my property. Lately the power has been flickering occasionally as spring foliage comes on weighing some limbs down and swaying in the wind often coming into momentary contact. We had some tree damage in Hurricane Michael and subsequent tornado winds of late so I started removing every tree within 75 feet of my house and within reach of the power lines. In so doing I accidentally knocked out the power last week. It was very impressive watching the sweet gum tree instantly bursting into flames 75 feet up along with a big bang as the jack blew out on a nearby pole. Sorry no photos of that! It would have been more impressive! But one 30" tree was fairly dead, hollow up to about 20 feet and 1/4 of one side rotted away with its top reaching over 90 feet high. So it was only a matter of time before it took out the power lines.

When I felled the bad tree I noticed something inside like a large lizard so I stuck my hand inside the mushy center and pulled out this lizard. They are not native to the US but probably came from someone's terrarium or his progenitors did. They are from SE Asia. They are even more rare in N. Florida where I live where it can snow on occasion. At least its too cold to encourage the spread of anacondas and pythons now found in South Florida.

These lizards can hurt when they bite ..... far more than the typical chameleons, and are double their size. When aggravated, the browns flatten their head to almost twice the normal round size and hiss when getting ready to bite. I let this one go of course after taking these photos. I have seen other smaller ones around too. I held him tight until be cooled down though before opening my hand. It was a challenge to photograph him moving in one hand and holding the camera in the other.

Well Stated! In the end, Judgement is a mere assessment of reflected and absorbed Light on the retina which varies with persons. Given that we all see the spectrum differently, is not beauty an abstract value because the eye can't measure what it can't see. Hence beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I would also suggest there is often an emotional value that skews what we see irrespective of all other photographic measures and viewers.