Aquatic lightning
Sometimes mistakes turn out for the best, and when I was out at the vernal pool complex near my house—the area I've been monitoring since the mid-1980s—I noticed the first larger-scale nighttime movement of Spotted Salamanders. The Macs were pooled up in the main vernal's exit stream just below a small blockage area that functions as a natural mini-dam and often serves as a courtship area. I had the video lights and an 85mm micro lens on the camera, and I thought I'd have enough digital horsepower to stop the salamanders in their tracks, but I guessed wrong. Or, well, maybe, right. I like the way the spots blurred into the same kind of motion that I've tried to photograph when documenting moving fireflies. Here we have it: underwater "lightning" made by courting "lightning" Macs.