Nature Vision Photography - Ryan Lucenkiw

10/28/2025

Overview The Milky Way core has officially set for the season — but that doesn’t mean the show is over. November brings long, dark nights perfect for deep-sky imaging, meteor showers, and a bright comet visible from dark-sky areas. If you’ve been waiting for uninterrupted hours under the stars...

10/07/2025

https://www.ryanlucenkiw.com/night-sky-preview/october-2025-night-sky-preview

The best astronomy events for photographers in October 2025

08/18/2025

l'd never seen gentians of any kind before last week. They'd been on my radar to look for. I randomly stumbled across some bottle gentians in a city park of all places. That prompted me to go look a little harder and now l've also seen some fringed gentians which I expect to be in their prime this week.
My search also led me to see some of these (maybe one of a kind) strawberries and cream morph of the bottle gentian.

07/13/2025

Wood lilies in Riding Mountain National Park

07/03/2025

Wild roses. The first of many wildflower spotlight posts on the days to come. The wildflowers are just so abundant in Riding Mountain National Park this year. I love it. I’ll include a few videos in the comments.

07/02/2025

June 30 was just such an awesome night. My plan was to watch the moon set, but I got to see so much more..

06/26/2025

Prickly pear and a few other wildflowers I found in Grasslands National Park. These are some of the images accompanying the blog post I shared a few days ago

06/24/2025

Four years ago on a Visit to Grasslands National Park - a trip that ended up being mostly exploratory - I made an observation that would see me return years later.

While prickly pear cactus are in Manitoba, and I have seen them in many locations (out of season), we don’t have the same topography of Grasslands.

Last week, after a call to the park to check in on timing, I made a spur of the moment trip to try and capture these cacti in bloom.

Check out my story here.

After nearly four years of waiting for the prickly pear bloom in Grasslands National Park, I finally returned to 70 Mile Butte to chase the shot I’d been imagining. Careful planning, sudden changes, and a bit of luck all came together in one golden-hour hike.

06/21/2025

Had a short trip to Grasslands National Park this week. I was going to photograph the prickly pear cacti. One of the highlights from the trip ended up being when I stumbled across this pincushion in bloom overlooking the valley. I knelt down to take a photo with my 20mm when I noticed this little black spider with red hourglass shape on it. A few minutes later when I ran into Parks employee, I learned that I saw a western black widow, one of the most venomous spiders in North America.

Unedited raw plus a few cropped versions to zoom in on the spider.

05/25/2025

Three flowered avens AKA prairie smoke. Another early bloomer, though not as early as the crocus. They go by prairie smoke because of how wispy they can get when they go to seed. These little flowers were a maximum if about 20cm tall, and while they filled a field as far as you could see, it’s still super easy to just pass them by if you’re not looking for them. I’ve never dedicated and outing to them before and this sunset shoot was awesome!