​I recently visited San Juan Island, one of a group of islands in the San Juan Islands.  Red foxes have been a part of San Juan Island for many years and were imported to kill the overabundant bunny population, and bunnies were imported prior to the foxes to feed people.  So neither the bunnies nor the foxes are indigenous to the island nor is either population in danger of extinction. Foxes acclimate easily, not just in the San Juan Islands, but anywhere in the world that you find a fox, and the San Juan Island foxes flourished on the island.   
 
The island is populated by very wealthy people who have beautiful homes with wonderful sea views.  These people appear to feel threatened by photographers who they believe are harassing the fox in order to get shots.  There has been an on-going war of sorts for many years.  The islanders were able to get a plains area in a state park that housed several fox dens closed to everyone due to their complaints about photographers.  This simply pushed photographers to any den in the BLM portion of land not far from the state park.  The BLM has different rules about wildlife than the state park does. 
 
When I was there photographing a fox den I was shouted at on more than one occasion by locals, who always seemed to have their dog on a leash walking with them.  A woman saw us photographing and walked in front of us on the trail with her dog where minutes before had been fox kits playing but she shouted at us to leave the fox alone and told us we were harassing them but yet she seemed to think it was ok to walk her dog right where the fox kits had been minutes before.  Another person shouted at us from a distance away to leave a fox along that we were photographing as it sat watching their husky, on a leash, that had stopped it in its tracks, so the fox was obviously bothered by the dog.  The neighbors have been feeding these foxes for years and the foxes are very acclimated to people because of this.  It has also created a situation where foxes get run over on the road because the neighbors live across the road from their den so the road must be crossed to get the food they offer.  We saw one fox with what appeared to be a hen egg.  We saw various foxes cross the road and go by each house looking for a handout.  These neighbors don’t seem to understand that what they are doing is wrong.
 
They complained to Fish and Game when we were there, the government entity that patrols for BLM.  A ranger showed up to watch us photograph.  I spoke with her and asked what the wildlife rules were on BLM land.  She said that the only rule they had was to not impact in any way what the fox was doing.  Several neighbors had yelled that we had to stay 75 feet away from a fox and this is not the case on BLM land, there is no minimum distance to stay away.  We were probably around 50 feet as we photographed and no one in the groups we saw over the three-day period did anything that I would call unethical or questionable with the wildlife.  The foxes are so acclimated to people that they walked directly past me on several occasions and actually approached someone who had a to-go container in their hand taking it back to their car tried to get the container, he had to shoo the fox away.  The Fish and Game ranger said that neither Fish and Game nor BLM had a problem with the photographers, but they did have problems with the neighbors.  The ranger that day simply sat on a rock and looked at her phone and told us she was there to appease the neighbors and that they sometimes got 15 emails a day.
 
It was interesting to be at a fox den area and to observe the family.  There was a black male, limping on three legs due to some type of injury but he looked quite healthy and well-fed.  Then the red female with kits, someone said five but I only saw four at one time.  Then a black vixen and a red vixen that were subordinate females to help care for the kits and hunt.  According to a book I read by an animal scientist subordinate females are a female who did not become pregnant during mating season, these subordinate females are somewhat like hired help would be to us and they are tasked with duties by the male and female. Subordinate females, in studies, do not live as long as a normal mated female, most likely because of their inferior position in the fox family. But if the female that was mated was taken out of the picture then a subordinate female would move into that place in the family.  Sounds to me like a good back-up plan. 
 
We got to observe as the female that was hunting came up the trail and toward the den with a dead vole to give to the pups, who were probably at the end of five weeks old, to get them started on hunting.  We also watched as one of the females brough in fish from the nearby sea cliff area, but I don’t think that was for the pups, maybe for the male who was injured.  I did see one female bring in some food and the other female, the black one, run out and take it from the red female and eat it so they apparently do hunt for each other. The pups came out several times and it was fun to watch them play with each other and the parents.  If it were not for the vicious neighbors it would have been a 100% positive experience in wildlife behavior.      

Taking photographs at night can be difficult and the difficulties increase with the number of other photographers present!  I recently shot with a small group of photographers in the Tuolumne Meadows area of Yosemite National Park.  We were all stumbling around in the dark with headlamps trying to figure out focus and composition (and keep our footing), without really being able to see anything!  Not only was it night but we were on rock hillsides and uneven terrain with tripods and multiple cameras.  I, and others, would forget that we could not turn on the headlamp when we needed it, even in red light mode, when other people were shooting.  This meant if I lost focus for some reason I had to fumble around with the camera settings and try to find something with light on it to focus, and then reset the composition.  I got more than one shot that had someone's headlamp red light in it and I was even almost yelled at once for forgetting and turning on my light.  Night shooting is tough!  

In spite of it all, I got a few decent shots and I learned a lot in the process.  I have shot at night before but not in awhile and this was my first time attempting to shoot images to create a star trail.  I found, when I got home and looked at my shots, that I apparently cannot keep the camera still for long as I kept moving the composition when I really shouldn't have.  I used the Starry Landscape Stacker software program to combine scenes for Milky Way images as the combining of scenes decreased the noise in the images.  I used Photoshop for the 25 4-minute each images to create the star trail shot posted here.  

Creating a star trail shot was labor intensive, both in setting up to shoot it and in putting it together in Photoshop.  The trip was a good experience and I learned a lot and it was nice to finally get out on a trip in this era of Covid-fear.  

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For me photography is more than simply taking a snapshot of a subject.  I see far too many images where someone obviously sees something, let's say a pretty flower, and they walk up and snap away.  I recently heard the term "happy snapper" and I think this term would apply to the photographer who takes this kind of image.  I'm much more interested in the art of photography, no matter what genre I'm shooting in on any given day.  I think the term "art" applies to any photography genre, from photojournalism to fine art. The intent of an image does differ, why we take that shot, but no matter why we take the shot we can apply artistic concepts to it to make it the very best shot we can.  These artistic concepts can occur in camera or in post.  Creating a more defined piece of artwork with a photograph is not new, this has been happening since the inception of photography.  The only difference in 2020 is that we now have the ability to create endless varieties of artwork with our shots via the computer, not the dark room.  I have worked in a photography darkroom as I took three semesters of Black and White film photography at a college.  I loved film processing and it was always exciting to see the image develop right before my eyes as the developer did its work.  Now, however, I have so much more leeway to make the image all my own, with my unique touch (for better or worse) and working on a computer is so much easier for me than working in a darkroom.  Since my career included computers and graphic arts I was able to use those skills when I started in digital photography and I realized at some point that I had a degree of inherent skill as far as being able to learn and master software.  I know this is difficult for some people even today, although we've now been digital for many years.  

The image below was shot with a mirrorless camera, a Nikon Z7.  A mirrorless camera makes it somewhat easier to shoot an image while hand-holding, versus a tripod, because the camera is able to capture sharp images even at lower shutter speeds.  I shot this image as I did because I knew I could play around with it in Photoshop to create something more than the image that I originally shot.  I love how this whole series of flower shots turned out. This image is very painterly but completely a photograph.