If you want a print of it, contact me and I can hook you into Pete, who knows about such things.

The shot below was of a red firework exploding in a storm cloud in the black of night.

In honor of them, I have had to make a cut to my top 10 shots. I took one of the new ones from Glacier and put it in there, and one had to fall… it was a tough pick, but here is the one, going down in flames in the Duomo… You had a great ride in the top 10 old friend…

This was appropriately shot on the “Going to the Sun” road, above waterfalls and snowy peaks, sprinkled around Glacier National Park.

I get email all the time and I hardly ever look at it all because it is just physically impossible. As of today, there are over 17,700 unreads in my Flickr box and countless more buried in Facebook, MySpace, Gmail, etc etc. But every now and then I see an interesting subject that I click on.

This one is probably gonna make you cry, so get ready… no two ways about it.

Tom Aellis emailed me and told me just a little bit – enough to make me go spend some time exploring his story. He has been diagnosed with MS, and he wanted one lasting photograph of him with his son. Tom apparently reads Stuck in Customs as well as several others, including the blog of Joe McNally, who recently wrote a book called “The Moment it Clicks”. Tom emailed McNally to tell him about the situation, and McNally is such a class act that he mustered his crew and went out to Tom’s home for a special photo shoot.

The following is from Tom:

Now, after three years of being a warrior fighting MS, I was losing. This was impossible for me to accept, as I have a 12 year old son to raise and teach all the things that he needs to know about being a good man. I want to show him how to treat people fairly , how to have passion for what he chooses (no matter what it is) and most of all, how to have kindness in his heart.

I’ll gladly link over to Joe’s blog so you can read the whole story for yourself and see the results.

So, Tom has inspired this shot below and probably tens of thousands of other dads out there this weekend that are going to be doing the same thing. Even though you do not see me in the picture with Ethan, I am in the picture with him.

We were graciously invited by Jack Horner up to northern Montana to join him on a dinosaur dig, My 7-year-old son (and the 7-year-old in me) is excited as can be by this once in a lifetime experience. We are not sure yet, but we think there is a special kind of Tyrannosaurus Rex that has been uncovered near Rudyard, Montana. Jack has his dig team out there, so we are going to camp out with them for a while and help with the dig… we are mega excited.

For a few nights before the dig, I took the family unit here to nearby Glacier National Park. We stayed at the Many Glacier Inn, which is this 1930’s Swiss-style chalet on a beautiful lake looking out at Mount Grinnell and several glaciers.

I woke up early in the morning to get this shot, while the rest of my family and the inn was still asleep. As usual, I had my ipod on full blast while I took in the scene and snapped away.

If you look down at the bottom, you can see all the rocks through the crystal-clear glacial lake.

And Ukraine taught me a new level of cold that I thought was reserved somewhere in the nether Dante regions…

But there is a new artistic community that has the strange name of the Behance Network. I put together a collection of 20 of my most experimental digital art pieces there. I’ve put a few of them beneath. If you also have an artistic side and want to give that network a try, I think it might be worth a try. They have everything from illustration to graphic arts to motion graphics… It’s quite possible I will tire of it in a few months and never go back… I’ve very open-minded about my web 2.0 abandonment issues.

You can see the sun clearly shining down in the foreground on the travertine and the bright orange of the bacteria floating in the steaming expulsions.

Seeing all the colors in this shot, while being in a famous cathedral in Holland, seemed to make a good occasion for that title.

The second one to show up a lot is the one from the Red Light district, which is a rather sketchy place to take my camera…

Ah yes… the wet streets of Paris here… Seems like an idyllic place for this little store called Cartier, eh?

I’ve put the these below, followed by to owner of the Afghan herself, Katerina of Siberia. Note she does not go by that name in public, but I think it would be cool if she did.

But I do remember this shot - it was a lone swan on a lake in the famous Stanley Park of Vancouver. I shot this when I went up there to speak at the Canadian Cato Institute to a bunch of Libertarians about online gaming economies being their last great hope.

You can get a link to the contest, the webpage, and find out more about the sponsoring website at this link.

This day and evening I was in Yellowstone alone. I had just seen a grizzly bear and a black bear about 30 minutes before this shot, crossing the road in front of me. They went on their way and I was left in the middle of this area with just a few elk meandering a few hundred feet from me.