I have been thinking about the latest challenge from Aminus3 Photography - morning. Mornings are my time, always has been. Drink coffee, read news (although that is more of a challenge that ever these days), watch the kids in the neighborhood trundle off to school in the next block. I wanted to provide a few diverse things that all represent mornings -

1. Can it be morning without that burning sphere rising to warn this planet and bring light into the world? Of course not. This one is from Chandler, Quebec, looking east out to the Atlantic Ocean. Taken with just a pocket Nikon, it nearly captures that warming sun creeping above the horizon.

2. Sunday morning, Galway. Someone is headed out to get some early fishing in. I was wandering the streets early before taking the bus back to Dublin for my flight home, and saw a satisfied man pursuing his passion.

3. This next one is an early morning photograph taken in Port Townsend, Washington. A ferry is taking passengers across Puget Sound - remembering the location, this ferry was perhaps coming from Victoria on Vancouver Island. How many were arriving to work? How many were like us, tourists headed for their next destination? It was the light reflecting on the water that appealed to me in this photograph.

4. For most, morning means work, or chores. I like this photograph from Amish country in Pennsylvania that reflects that ethic. And more than most, this work is toiling without benefit of engines; it is just man, horses, and mechanics connected to that real horsepower. I snapped this out the window of my car after visiting Lock 12 along the Susquehanna River.

5. Sometimes, morning is a shared experience, as shown in this next photograph. There were dozens of us photographers standing in the cold and stiff breeze waiting for the sun to peek over the mountains to the east of the Bosque del Apache in December 2022. It would be as those warming rays appeared that the sandhill cranes would rouse after a night on the pond for the big fly out. What a thrill to experience these magnificent birds lean into the wind and take flight - a handful, or dozen at a time. We were all there to experience it, and most of us hoped to get an image that would attempt to capture it. That is quite the morning.

6. And for me, as an old retired guy working on a handicap, mornings mean the first tee time. Not really very provocative, but hey, it is what morning means these days. Coffee, breakfast, run to the course, and make that time.

—Ever forward — one foot in front of the other.