getting all ansel adams on mother nature's ass

That's what my eloquent fiance said I was doing when I showed him some of these pictures, taken at Brookgreen Gardens in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

The only picture I am disappointed with is the one of the blue heron. It was so prehistoric and beautiful and weird, and it just isn't captured. (You can see it on the Gardens' website, though.) I was enamored with this creature. Later I realized this is the bird that Richard Powers ruminated on in his book The Echomaker. Yeah, this book won the National Book Award. Yeah, it has a wonderful title. Yeah, the plot sounds irresistibly interesting. Yeah, it got a glowing review on NPR that made me buy it for friends and family before even reading it myself. DON'T READ THIS BOOK!!!! It is atrocious. I am not saying it's uninteresting, or it has slightly too many adverbs, or the characters could have been developed more, or twenty pages could have been cut out. I am saying ALL the pages should have been cut out, and I could have examined a splinter for 10 hours and had a better time. This was easily the worst 'good' book I've ever read. Go ahead and read it to prove me wrong, but don't say you haven't been warned. And don't be fooled by the first two pages which make you think the tome may be a poetic metaphor. The other hundreds of pages are written like a fourth grader.