Improve your relationships

Following a nice sunrise on the dunes, my workshop group had started the undulating trek back to the cars. While we hadn’t gotten a lot of color that morning, we’d been blessed with virgin sand beneath a translucent layer of clouds. Quite content with the soft, low contrast light for most of the morning, right toward the end the sun snuck through to deliver high contrast, light-skimming drama that provided about five minutes of…

Let’s get vertical

Who had the bright idea to label horizontal images “landscape,” and vertical images “portrait”? To that person let me just say, “Huh?” As a landscape-only photographer, about half of my images use “portrait” orientation. I wonder if this arbitrary naming bias subconsciously encourages photographers to default to a horizontal orientation for their landscape images, even when a vertical orientation might be best. Every image contains implicit visual motion that’s independent of the…

Doing the math

A few days ago Sony asked me to write a couple of small pieces on “my favorite landscape lenses.” Hmmm. My answer? My favorite lens is the lens that allows me to do what I need to do at that moment. In fact, to avoid biasing my creativity, I consciously avoid approaching a scene with a preconceived notion of the lens to use. What…

Think before you shoot

True story: I once had a woman in a workshop who put her camera in Continuous mode and every time she clicked her shutter, she held it down and waved her camera in the general direction of a scene until the buffer was full. When I asked what she was doing, she said, “There’s bound to be a good one in there somewhere.” We were in…

Who needs vacations?

I was hungry, wet, and cold. With the blacktop obscured by a slippery white veneer, I carefully followed my headlights and a faint set of parallel tire tracks through the Northside Drive tree tunnel. Though the storm that had lured me to Yosemite was finally clearing, that show was lost to the night and dense forest canopy. But even without another clearing storm to add to my Yosemite portfolio, I was quite…

Dinner is overrated (and I have the pictures to prove it)

In my Snow day post a few days ago, I shared the story of an overnight dash to Yosemite to photograph snow. I wrapped up that long day photographing various Yosemite Valley views in the frigid damp, bundled at Tunnel View, waiting in vain for the storm to clear. The sky was darkening quickly, and when a dense cloud engulfed my view I decided my (pretty sweet) day was…

Is a tripod really necessary?

If you’re content with derivative snaps of pretty scenes, a tripod may not be for you. But for those who agree that, rather than regurgitating a rough representation of the world as we know it, landscape photography should reveal deeper, less obvious natural truths—things like relationships between diverse elements, an intimate exploration of larger scenes, detail and pattern lost in the blur of motion—there is no substitute for a…

I love you, goodbye…

Last week I said goodbye to my Sony a7S. More than any camera I’ve owned, this is the camera that overcame photography’s physical boundaries that most frustrated me. I’ve been interested in astronomy since I was ten, ten years longer than I’ve a been photographer. But until recently I’ve been thwarted in my attempts to fully convey the majesty of the night sky above a grand landscape. What was…

Big moon

A few years ago, Don Smith and I were browsing the gallery of a famous landscape photographer when we came across a striking image of a tree silhouetted against a huge moon. Because the image was clearly a composite—a tree picture transposed atop a picture of a huge moon—we were initially shocked, but soon simply amused by the photographer’s dramatic, “blood pulsing” fiction of his “capture.” To this day, merely quoting a few…

Reflection season

It’s reflection season in Yosemite, that time of year when the falls are dry and the Merced River slows to a glassy crawl. Plugging in the golds and reds of autumn makes this my favorite time for creative photography in Yosemite, and explains the volume of Yosemite autumn images in my portfolio. It also explains why I’ve been to Yosemite three times this month. The month’s first visit, with my Eastern Sierra workshop group, we photographed high…