Yosemite Full Moon Bingo

Do you have little games you play in your head? Private challenges that range from small amusements to all-encompassing obsessions—things like guessing how many miles until this desert highway crests that distant rise, or how many peanuts in a row you can land in the cocoa mug on the coffee table, or guessing the current time to the minute before looking at the clock. You…

2019 Highlights

We’ve reached that time of year where everyone is compiling their Top 10 lists. I like retrospectives as much as the next person, but I’ve always resisted assembling these “top-whatever” end-of-year countdowns of my own images. Then last week Sony asked me to provide my favorite image of 2019 and I struggled mightily because it felt like they were asking me to pick a…

On the other hand…

On Wednesday I wrote about featuring the sky in my images, and how my love for all things astronomical and meteorological reflects in my photography. On the other hand… As much as I love photographing the moon, stars, rainbows, and lightning to my images, there are many photo-worthy subjects right here on terra firma. And usually the best way to feature them is to…

Eyes on the Sky

We tend to photograph the things we love most, but I don’t think that necessarily happens consciously. For example, I never appreciated the role the sky plays in my photography until someone pointed it out a few years ago. Browsing my galleries to verify, I was amazed at the percentage of my images that include at least one of the following: the sun, the…

It’s About Time

Among the many things I’m giving thanks for this Thanksgiving weekend is the return of rain and snow to California. Normally I’d have rearranged my schedule to be in Yosemite for the season’s first snow, but because family trumps photography, I had more important things to do. So Yosemite will just have to be beautiful without me. As much as I love photographing Yosemite with…

The Motion of the Ocean

Silky water images take a lot of flak for being overused and unnatural. Sure, long exposures that blur a rushing creek into a white stripe, or smooth crashing surf into to a gauzy haze, can be trite (no judgement—these effects can also be beautiful). But the argument that motion blur in a water image is always invalid because it’s not “natural” just doesn’t hold…

The Milky Way Saves the Day

I’m a one-click photographer (no composites or blending), so all of my Milky Way images were captured in a single frame. I stress a lot before and during a photo workshop. A lot more than people know, and a lot more than I probably should. Some of that stress probably helps me ensure things go smoothly, but some things are just plain irrational because…

Low Hanging Fruit

A few days ago I posted an El Capitan in winter image on Instagram. Since it had been nearly three years since that trip, a lot of the specifics of that day had slipped my mind, but when I pulled up the Instagram image’s raw file in Lightroom to check the capture info, a few more of that day’s (so far unprocessed) images caught…

Go Big or Go Home

Like a teenager with his first car, I was itching to take my brand new Sony 200-600 for a spin. But since I don’t photograph wildlife, my ultra-telephoto lenses are used mostly for the moon, and occasionally close-focus stuff like fall color and wildflowers. And as much as I wanted to try it on the moon, I thought the fall color in my Eastern…

Enjoying Our World on Nature’s Terms

Nature photographers have a tenuous relationship with clocks and calendars. They’re useful when we need to interact with the rest of the world on its terms, but pursuing our craft requires us to defer to the fundamental laws of nature: the Earth’s rotation on its axis, the Earth’s revolution about the sun, and the moon’s motion relative to the Earth and sun. While my years are…