Greetings!

It's now summer in the northern hemisphere and, outside of a little stormy weather (see below), our art festival season has been off to a great start! It's been a pleasure seeing so many familiar faces already this year. The next several weeks take us to communities in greater Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota. Please come and visit if you are in any of these areas. We will return to the Twin Cities in August for the Uptown Art Fair.

• June 22 - Lemonade Concert & Art Fair - Campus of St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN
• June 24-25 - Park Point Art Fair - End of Park Point, Duluth, MN
• July 1 - Shell Lake Fine Art Festival - Shell Lake, WI
• July 8-9 - Grand Marais Arts Festival - Grand Marais, MN
• July 13-15 - Downtown Fargo Street Fair - Fargo, ND
• July 29-30 - Alexandria Art in the Park - Alexandria City Park, Alexandria, MN

My photograph "Lake Effect" was recently juried into the 2013 Minnesota State Fair Fine Arts Exhibition.

I made this image on a -10°F morning at Brighton Beach in Duluth. This photograph portrays the sun peering through the fog that rises from Lake Superior when the air temperature falls to well-below the lake's surface temperature.

The State Fair's Fine Arts Exhibition, open for the duration of the fair, features the works of Minnesota artists in a variety of media. It is located in the Fine Arts Center, just north of the 4-H building on the east side of the fairgrounds.

Typically, about 15% of artwork submitted each year to this juried competition is selected for display. The last, and only other, time I've exhibited in this show was in 2010 when my image "Watchdogs of the Prairie" was selected for display.

If you go to the Minnesota State Fair, be sure to check out the works of the many talented artists on exhibit in the Fine Arts Center!

Park Point, more formally known as Minnesota Point, is a seven-mile long sandbar in Duluth that extends from Canal Park to the Superior, Wisconsin harbor entry. It is interrupted by the man-made Duluth canal, and hence, is technically an island and no longer a sandbar. Technicalities aside, Minnesota Point, combined with the three-mile Wisconsin Point is believed to be the largest freshwater sandbar in the world.

I was walking along the beach on a recent visit to Park Point and noticed some interesting cloud formations in the sky over Lake Superior. Soon, I found the sand formation in the image above that almost-perfectly complements the cloud pattern in the sky. The golden hues of the beachgrass also offer a nice contrast with the light blue sky and lake.

Because of the simplicity of these images, they are great as desktop wallpaper backgrounds, and I have added the specially-sized images here.

"Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter." - Ansel Adams

With the opening of the popular Bentleyville USA Tour of Lights yesterday, Duluth has put on its Christmas hat yet again. With nearly three million lights illuminating dozens of displays, Bentleyville proclaims itself as the largest holiday light display in the Midwest. The panoramic image above of downtown Duluth, the waterfront, and the Bentleyville display is a previously unreleased image from 2009. A notable addition to the 2010 display is a 120-foot tall steel-fabricated Christmas tree adorned with 50,000 LED lights that jive in sync to the tunes of "Jingle Bell Rock" and other Christmas favorites.

Bentleyville 2010 Tour of Lights is open daily November 20 through December 26, weather permitting. More information can be found here: http://www.bentleyvilleusa.org.