The Water Hole
Las Vegas is one of the driest places you can imagine, so finding a little pocket of water like this always catches my attention. I took this photo not far from the place where I found those strange caterpillars, and the two scenes almost feel like companions — completely different, but born from the same patch of desert.
Looking at this water made me think about people traveling across the West a long time ago. Imagine being out there for days, hot, exhausted, and thirsty enough that almost any water would look beautiful.
Then you finally come across something like this.
Green water. Plants floating on the surface. Who knows what else is living in it.
And you probably wouldn’t spend much time wondering whether it was clean.
You’d just be thinking, water.
That’s what I like about photographs like this. I can take a picture of a small place most people might walk past, and years later it can send my imagination somewhere completely different.
And now, in my version, somebody else has found the water hole too.
The Armored Bug
This one started with something we see around here every fall: stink bugs. One year there seemed to be a whole army of them. We have farm fields around us, so maybe conditions were just right and they had a bumper year. Whatever happened, they were everywhere.
The funny thing about stink bugs is they don’t really do much once they get inside. They just seem to appear. You look down and there’s one sitting there like somebody placed it on the floor. They don’t move very fast, and they’re easy to catch, but if you stop and really look at one, they have an incredible shape. To me, they look almost prehistoric.
That hard outer shell is what caught my imagination. I looked at it and thought, that’s armor. Once I saw that, the rest came pretty naturally. If nature already gave this little bug a defensive shell, what would it look like if somebody turned that design into a modern armored vehicle?
So I built the idea outward from the bug instead of replacing it. The shell became the body of a tank, the legs became part of the machinery, and then I added the technology: heavy armament, advanced sensors, and lasers for taking out drone attackers. A natural defense system turned into a high-tech one.
That’s what I like most about this kind of project. The idea was already sitting there in the original creature. I just gave it another job.
