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…

Feast or Famine at the Grand Canyon

We had reached the final night of this year’s second and final Grand Canyon monsoon photo workshop. To say that I’d spent the weeks leading up to this year’s workshops monitoring the Grand Canyon weather forecast, praying for the monsoon storms that bring lightning, would be a gross understatement—but despite all this vigilance and no small amount of strategic scrambling during the workshop, we’d…

Wait for it…

Landscape photographers have a couple of ways to make nice images. By far the most important is the ability to see the special but less obvious, then know how to compose and expose that special vision in ways that clarify and convey the previously unseen beauty. But sometimes we just need to know when to show up and where to point the camera, and…

Frozen in Time

Lightning Strike, Brahma Temple, Grand Canyon Sony a7RIV Sony 24-105 G 1/4 second F/8 ISO 250 I’ve always been intrigued by still photos’ ability to reveal aspects of the natural world that are missed by human vision.  A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the camera’s ability to, through long exposures, blur motion and reveal unseen patterns in moving water. And last week…

The Reason I Do This: Redux

Three Strikes, Lightning and Rainbow from Bright Angel Point, Grand Canyon Canon EOS 5D Mark III 1/3 second 24-105L ISO 100 f/11 August 2013 Nature photographers plan, and plan, and plan some more, but no amount of planning can overcome the fickle whims of Mother Nature. Few things are more disappointing than a long anticipated and perfectly executed shoot washed out by conditions beyond…

More Monsoon Magic

Greetings from the Grand Canyon. It’s pretty hard to post a blog in the middle of a workshop, and downright near impossible when the Internet is down and your cellular carrier has capped your roaming data at 200 megabytes (which I ripped through in 3 days, with only 12 days to go—thank you very much, T-Mobile). But here I am, a day late, with…

A Lot Like Fishing—Until It’s Not

Photographing lightning is about 95 percent arms folded, toe-tapping, just-plain-standing-around-scanning-the-horizon—interspersed with random bursts of pandemonium. Usually, after all that waiting waiting around, with the first bolt usually comes the realization that you anticipated wrong and either, 1) the lightning is way over there; or 2) the lightning is right here (!). What generally ensues is a Keystone Cops frenzy of camera bag flinging, tire…

Monsoon Madness

Every August for the last seven years, good friend and fellow pro photographer Don Smith and I have done a Grand Canyon Monsoon photo workshop where we attempt to, among many other things, photograph lightning. I say “many other things” because Grand Canyon doesn’t need lightning to be spectacular. And even without lightning, the monsoon storms that build above the canyon most afternoons add…

I Just Have To Share This

I don’t usually write a brand new blog in the middle of a workshop, but I have to share last night’s experience August 7, 2019 Scanning the southern horizon from the view deck of Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim, I saw no sign of lightning. Far to the south was a somewhat promising curtain of rain, maybe 30 miles beyond the South…

Stop Being So Negative!

Lightning (at a safe distance) is pretty cool. It has always fascinated me, partly for the ephemeral power that can explode a tree and disappear before my brain can register its existence, but also because lightning is a rare sight for these California eyes. What what exactly is going on in a lightning bolt? I thought you’d never ask…. The shocking truth about lightning…