There is a saying "Beauty is all around us for those who wish to see it". For years I would get depressed when I returned to Illinois after trips out to the Southwest. Then circumstances forced me to make the best of it. The vast majority of the images in this gallery are from a little county conservation area just a few minutes away from my home in McHenry, IL. There's another old saying, "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear". Well, sometimes you can. Many of the places portrayed in the following images look nothing like this at other times of the day. That's why people in my home town rarely recognize where the shots were taken. However, if you get there at sunrise, actually before sunrise, or at sunset, it's amazing what you can get. I set a goal as a child to never miss a sunrise or sunset. I've stuck to that goal for over 40 years, and the images you see here, especially in the Midwestern Scenes gallery, are largely a product of doing so. Rarely is there another person around when I shoot such images. Look what everyone else has missed. Occasionally there will be a majenta cast to the sky even thought the split field neutral density filters are gray. This is apparently an artifact of Velvia 100 film which I was unaware of until it was too late.