While organizing and cataloging the photos from my last Hokkaido Photo Tour from February 2020, I happily shot some near-perfect minimalist landscapes.  I counted about 30 beautiful, minimalist landscapes shots that were all laid out for me with minimal editing required, and I thought I will leave them for the moment while I began examining some of the birding and wildlife photography, the Steller’s Sea Eagles, the White-tailed Eagles, Hokkaido’s snow ballerinas the Red-crowned Cranes, the Ezo Sika Deer, or the Ezo Red Foxes.  At that moment, I realized the scene I had captured.  In the photo I’ve attached to this newsletter, you see a lone Steller’s Sea Eagle seeming to gaze up and out of frame, but what I didn’t immediately realize is that he was directly below all my neatly organized Hokkaido landscape photos.  I wondered where his eagle eye was gazing; then, my imagination took over. My experience during my 20+ years of Hokkaido birding and my 40 some years of wildlife photo experience kicked into overdrive, and I brought every experience I’d ever had with Steller’s Sea Eagles to mind. Was this raptor scanning, as one of my friends on Facebook, Alice, suggested deeply immersed in ‘food for thought or thinking of food’?  I started poring over the landscape photos in the series to see if I had missed anything.  Using my ‘Beginner’s Mindset,’ I tried to look at the photos as if I had never been to Hokkaido, trying to see the landscapes with new eyes.  In my immersion into visual artistry, I don’t know how many minutes, potentially hours I had spent zooming in on the crevices of the snow-covered mountains, but when I get into a photography zone, time becomes nearly immaterial.  Slowly pulling myself back into focus, I looked to the side of me into the reflection of myself in my Mac book pro 16-inch monitor turned off, and I realized that I struck almost the exact pose as my Hokkaido friend, the Steller’s Sea Eagle.  I couldn’t help but laugh at myself and my posture.