Every October I reset the feeder pole behind my sister’s house in Southeast Michigan, and every October I relearn that the birds are the easy part. Last year a downy woodpecker worked the suet cage at eight in the morning with the sun still low behind a white pine, and I shot forty frames of the back of its head because the perch pointed away from the only clean light in the yard. The woodpecker came back for three weeks. My photographs came back the same forty frames every morning until I moved two things.…

The first spring I photographed the marsh at Indiana Dunes I made a beginner’s mistake that still embarrasses me. I wanted a low angle of the water and the reeds, so I stepped off the boardwalk and sank to my knees in the mud at the edge of a nesting pool. Nothing dramatic happened. But I had left a trail of broken stems and churned muck through exactly the cover that a pair of mallards was using, and I spent the rest of the morning watching the hen circle rather than settle. Since then I have worked wetlands for a land trust’s restoration records, and the rule I follow is…

A perennial border is a slow argument between the gardener and the calendar, and the only honest way to photograph that argument is to stay in one place and let it run. Four years ago I set a small brass marker in the turf at the end of the same twenty-four-foot border in southern Minnesota and resolved to shoot it from that spot once a month for a year. It took me three seasons to keep the promise. The first year I chased the best blooms and ended up with a folder of unrelated flowers; the second year I understood that the point is not the flowers at all but…

I have photographed the same eighty-acre oak woods in central Ohio for eleven years, and it has no one best hour. It has a good minute, and that minute moves. The edge — the seam where the woods meets the old field — is where I spend most late afternoons, because it is the only place I can stand in one kind of light and look into another. The interior of the wood is already dark by four in October; the field beside it is still bright. Everything that happens in the last hour happens in that strip of transition, and it happens fast. An edge is two light environments…

My pollinator garden is a sixty-foot city lot, and its season opens quietly in the last week of April, when the first sweat bees come out and the bumble bee queens are still flying alone, hunting for a nest site while the serviceberry is barely open. That week is easy to miss. By the time the bee balm and the coneflowers are loud in July, the yard is moving and most people take their one photograph of the year. I have kept a weekly record of mine for six seasons now, and the first thing the record taught me is that a pollinator garden shot only at peak bloom is…