It wasn’t just little lizards that made me want to get an SLR after spending the summer of 2004 in Florida. Nearby Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge introduced me to alligators, but like the green anole, after leaving Florida at the end of the summer it would be another decade before I’d see them again.

I photographed this mostly submerged alligator in the still waters at sunrise in a freshwater marsh at South Carolina’s Huntington Beach State Park.