Barry Tanenbaum

Sharon Stiteler was seven years old when she saw a pileated woodpecker—not in the wild, mind you, but in the pages of a Peterson Field Guide. It was enough. “I was intrigued by the idea that there was a crow-sized woodpecker out there,” she says.

It's no secret that professional photographers are less concerned with cameras and lenses than they are with understanding and controlling the light that allows their images to be made.

The exclamatory headline was in an e-mail sent to me by Dr. Alan Sloyer when I asked him to forward the high-res file for this image, which he took in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on a family vacation in 2017.

For a long time, the photographs Susan Ford Collins posted to Flickr were taken with her DSLRs. Her favorite subjects were flowers; travel photos, people, landscapes, and various large and small wildlife filled out the photostream and the albums