Monterey is one of my favorite places to visit in California. I do not go there too often since the drive is about an 1 1/2 to 2 hours away from me but when I do go I always take in the beauty that Monterey has to offer.

My favorite things to do while in Monterey is go to Old Fisherman's Wharf and visit with the California Sea Lions. Monterey has some of the best chowder that I have ever tasted. When you are at the Wharf all the restaurants will be serving samples of the clam chowder for you to taste. I always make my rounds to taste the clam chowder and then decide which one I like best for that day but normally Gilbert's or Rappa's have the best at the Wharf from my experience.

There is a lot of wildlife out in Monterey ...

While driving in my car heading to the zoo I heard some great news about Western Lowland Gorillas on NPR. They announced that the Wildlife Conservation Society gorilla experts discovered in the Republic of Congo an estimated 125,000 Western Lowland Gorillas living in the countries Northern Forests.

The reason for the high numbers is because there is no war, logging and disease epidemics that is linked to man. Hardly anyone goes into this forest do to it being hard to move around through the swamp land.

This is great news for the Western Lowland Gorillas species because they are listed as Critically Endangered and the number they discovered is more then 2x the world population that they thought was left.

[link=http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93254830]...

What's Up With The Boats, Buildings, Fire Trucks and Other Pictures That Are Not Animals?

That is the question I have been getting lately from a lot of my photographer friends that know me as an animal photographer. For many years my friends in the Flickr Community have seen nothing but animals in my photo collection but the past several months I have been starting to take pictures of other things that are not of the norm for me. When they ask me that question I tell them about Dreamstime and how through Dreamstime I have wanted to branch out and take pictures of more then just animals. After a few weeks of joining up on Dreamstime I started going to the library and searching online new places for me to explore and I am totally loving photographing ...

Before I even upload a picture onto Dreamstime I do my research on the particular subject in my picture. Also while I am researching I look at at Dreamstime stock photos for the subject that I will be uploading just to get a feel of other pictures of the same subject. I notice a lot of times especially when it comes to animals and flowers the subjects are mislabeled or they are given a generic name cause they do not know what animal it is.

Most of the time when it comes to animals I know exactly what the animal is but if I do not I will not upload the picture until I find out exactly what it is. If I take a picture of an animal in a zoo I go to the zoos website and look at their list of animals which sometimes they have pictures to go with each animal ...

We all know someone that has to always be the funny one no matter what. Well it seems true even when it comes to some animals.

I know a gorilla by the name of Zura who loves to be funny when ever I go to the zoo and visit with her. I have been visiting with Zura for a little over 3 years now and almost on a weekly basis. Zura recognizes me so when ever she sees me she will sit right in front of me and start to act funny for the camera. She laughs a lot when she is excited to see me and she loves to wiggle her tongue at me. She recently has started making faces at me which cracks me up. People start to take notice that she is interacting with me so they rush over to the location I am at and start to crowd around so they can get pictures of Zura acting silly. Zura'...