Fine Art means different things to many people, but for me it is the "little pictures" we often pass by and never notice. Most are things that are there day after day. Others are fleeting moments such as a cat peeping out of an old tin building in Argentina. A very rich site for fine art subjects is the La Boca district of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Street scenes in La Boca can easily become clutter. So to show La Boca at its finest I focused the camera on small areas.

While walking in Manzanilla Beach Park in Trinidad I saw a blue fence. Certainly nothing to photograph but when combined with a painted wall on a building behind the fence, it found a new meaning for me. Another example of how combining two mundane subjects created a memorable photograph is the picture of sea grape leaves in front of a red wall in Speyside, Tobago. A final example is a window and shutters on a wall in the restaurant of Mt. Plaisir Estate Hotel in Grande Riviere, Trinidad. We were there looking for several days and I never saw anyone take a picture of that window. It was nice looking enough as a portion of a large wall, but once separated to the simple composition it reached a higher level.

Over the years I have visited most of the islands in the Caribbean. one place that I had not been was the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Cruise ships rarely visit there so when I found a trip offered by Cheesemans' Ecology Safaris going in May of 2011, I signed up. For the most part, our small groups of twelve people were birders. I have always liked birds but do not keep lists or go to great effort to identify birds. I certainly do not consider myself a bird photographer but have always photographed birds when the opportunity presented itself. The trip was a most pleasant experience made special by our tour leader, Edward Rooks. Edward grew up in Trinidad and not only knows the birds but nature in general. The island of Trinidad is about 16 times larger than Tobago so we stayed at Blue Waters Inn near the village of Speyside. Trinidad is only 10 degrees north of the equator and about 11 miles to the northeast of Venezuela. That means that the temperature is hot year round.

Patagonia is a region located in Argentina and Chile, integrating the southernmost section of the Andes Mountains in South America. The name Patagonia comes from the word patagón used by Magellan from Spain in 1520 to describe the native people that his expedition thought to be giants. It is no believed the Patagons were actually Tehuelche people with an average height of 5'11" compared to the 5'1" average for Spaniards at that time.

Patagonia contains the world's third largest glacier fields with Antarctica being the first followed by Greenland. The National Parks in both Argentina and Chile contain natural landscapes as impressive as anywhere else in the world. I was in Patagonia April of 2011. This was in their fall when the beech leaves were changing colors and the nights were cold. I have seen a lot of glacier ice but never have I seen ice as blue as it was in the Grey Glacier in Chile.

Yellowstone Park is for most people a summer time visit. But what is the park like when the summer tourists depart and winter arrives? To find out I joined 11 other photographers on a photo tour that was put together by Joe Van Os Photo Safaris. In January 2011 we experienced temperatures ranging from the upper 20's to -14 F and were told that it was rather warm for Yellowstone in January. We spent several nights inside the park and several just outside the park in the small town of West Yellowstone. Each day we had two snow coaches to travel about the park. While the park is open all winter, people are only allowed to enter as part of snowmobile day trips or as we did, on organized snow coach tours.

Yellowstone Park was established in 1872 and was the first national park in the world. The park is primarily in the state of Wyoming but its boundaries do extend into parts of the states of Montana and Idaho. While the park is known for its geothermal features and Old Faithful Geyser, it also has abundant wildlife and sub-alpine forests.

When I told friends that my wife, Margaret and I were going to the “Five Stan’s” and flying to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, their eyes glazed over and I knew that they had absolutely no idea where this was. It is a shame that this region is not on most Americans’ “bucket list” of places to visit. The people were friendly, food, water, and lodging are generally less expensive than in the US, and history is ever present. Centuries ago the Silk Route connected the East and the West through Central Asia. I became interested in Central Asia many years ago when reading about the Silk Road. Bukhara and Samarkand always seemed like mystical places to me, much as Timbuktu, Marrakesh, Katmandu and Istanbul. In each country we had a car with driver and a guide.

Be sure to read my article on International Travel News about this trip.