Getting centered

What do you think would happen if I submitted this image a camera club photo competition? The sunstar and golden glow might elicit a few oohs and ahhs at first, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be long before the resident Rule enforcer dismisses it because the horizon and sunstar are centered. And while “never center your subject” is great advice for a beginner who…

Focus Magic

As we enter the fall color photography season, I’m revisiting and revising previous articles. This is the third in the series. In this day of ubiquitous cameras, automatic exposure, and free information, a creative photographer’s surest path to unique images is achieved by managing a scene’s depth. While anyone with a camera can compose the left/right/up/down aspect of a scene, the front/back plane, a scene’s depth (that we human’s take…

Sony 24mm f/1.4 GM Lens: First thoughts

Today Sony announced the lens I’ve been waiting for: the Sony 24, f/1.4 GM. I got a sneak preview of this lens on Maui last week, and again once I got home home. Hurricane Olivia, my workshop (no one was supposed to see me using the lens), and food poisoning significantly limited my use of it, but I did get to play with it…

A Maui Memory

March 2018 Each year I do back-to-back workshops in Hawaii, one on the Big Island and one on Maui (it’s a tough job, but…, well, you know…). This year’s Big Island workshop was complicated first by the recent Kilauea eruption, and then by Hurricane Lane, which deposited 50 inches of rain on our host city Hilo just days before the workshop. To get my…

New Zealand Night

One of the questions I get the most about the New Zealand workshop Don Smith and I do is, “Why winter?” The simple answer is that it’s the best time to photograph there. This answer is usually followed with, “But isn’t it cold?” Not really—it’s more like a Northern California or Oregon winter, with highs in the 40s and 50s, and lows in the…

Better than a Pot of Gold

My relationship with Yosemite rainbows goes all the way back to my childhood, when a rainbow arcing across the face of Half Dome made my father more excited than I believed possible for an adult. I look back on that experience as the foundation of my interest in photography, my relationship with Yosemite, and my love for rainbows. So, needless to say, photographing a…

Addition by Subraction

Sometimes making a good photo is as much about what you leave out as it is about what you put in. The downfall of many images, both mine and others’, is the inclusion of too much visual activity—sometimes that activity is simply unappealing visual busyness, but often it’s elements that are visually appealing in their own right, but nevertheless distract from the main point…

Some Advice for Nikon Shooters (from a Sony Shooter)

Yesterday Nikon finally jumped into the mirrorless game with its Z6 and Z7 announcement, a welcome development that can only keep pushing everyone’s mirrorless technology forward. I made the switch to mirrorless about four years ago and haven’t looked back. At the beginning mirrorless was touted for its compactness, and while mirrorless bodies (and to a lesser extent, lenses) are more compact, it turns…

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…

Something’s Burning

Sun and Smoke, Bright Angel Point, Grand Canyon Sony a7RIII Sony 100-400 GM Sony 2x teleconverter ISO 200 f/11 1/50 second Tom Petty has a line that goes, “Most of the things I worry about, never happen anyway.” And one of the things I worry about most is, what if I schedule a workshop and the conditions are so lousy that no one gets any…