A Diamond in the Surf

With a break in my workshop schedule (and to prepare for my upcoming 2025 Highlights post), I’m working hard to catch up on this year’s unprocessed images. Moving more or less chronologically, I’m really having a blast—such a blast that balancing this processing with family Holiday priorities and the endless demands of running a business, my weekly blog schedule has slipped a bit. But…

Moon Chasing

Many years ago I stood with a couple of other photographers on Sentinel Bridge in Yosemite. It was a few minutes before sunset and we were waiting, cameras poised, for the moon to ascend from behind Half Dome. As we chatted, a young woman approached and asked no one in particular what we were all waiting for. When I told her about the imminent…

Things Always Work Out…

I’m a naturally positive person who doesn’t have to work too hard to stay optimistic about pretty much everything. And while this “things always work out” philosophy generally serves me quite well, it can sometimes cause problems. Case in point… A couple of weeks ago I was in Jackson Hole to help out Don Smith with his Grand Teton workshop. Back in the pre-Covid…

Lightning Safety (for Photographers)

If you’re reading this post and hope to stay completely safe from lightning, just stop right here and simply go indoors at the first flash, and stay there until 30 minutes after the last flash. (You’re welcome.) But if you would like to assume the risks of photographing lightning while staying as safe as possible, read on…. It’s a personal calculation  I share a…

A Different Kind of Thrilling

Chasing tornadoes is undeniably thrilling, but photographers don’t live by thrills alone. Or maybe a better way to put that would be, thrills don’t necessarily need to set your heart racing. Because after nearly 2 weeks chasing supercells and their (thrilling) progeny, I was only home for a couple of days before jetting off to New Zealand for a completely different kind of thrills….

That’s a Wrap

Photographing blue-sky California as much as I do, it seems that I spend much of my life strategizing, hoping, praying, and sometimes even begging (whatever it takes) for a quality sky to complement the Golden State’s spectacular scenery. So the irony wasn’t lost on me when my June storm chasing group spent nearly two weeks under absolutely jaw dropping skies, strategizing, hoping, praying and…

Bracketing, My Way

Bracketing then and now Remember the uneasy days of film, when we never knew whether we had exposed a scene properly until the film returned from the lab? So as insurance, we’d bracket our exposures, starting with the exposure we believed to be right, then hedge our bets by capturing the same composition at lighter and darker exposure values. Today, digital capture gives us…

Storm Chasing Diary: Saving the Best For Last

I’ve really enjoyed sharing my storm chasing images and experiences with everyone here on my blog, but need to end this “Storm Chasing Diary” series so I can return to some the unprocessed images from other recent trips. So the “last” referred to in the title is the series, not the images, which will keep coming as time permits. “Best” is a very subjective…

Storm Chasing Diary: Lucky Strike

How does one capture an image of a brilliant lightning bolt splitting the inverted prisms of a double rainbow? (No, not with AI or a composite—that’s cheating.) If you said luck, you’d be right—well, at least half right. But, right or not, there’s no surer way to elicit a defensive response from a nature photographer than to blurt some version of, “You were so…

Storm Chasing Diary: Safety, Schmafety

It feels pretty weird writing about sweltering Texas June afternoons while, only a couple of weeks later, shivering through frigid New Zealand June mornings, but welcome to my world. We’ve had some gorgeous photography Down Under again this year, and while I’d love to be able to capture, process, and blog in something closer to real time, my workshop priorities just don’t permit that….