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The following article isn’t a comprehensive eclipse photography how-to, but for eclipse viewers, it might be worth reading anyway I’m getting a lot of questions about next week’s (April 8, 2024) total solar eclipse. In addition the standard “how-to” questions, many have asked if I plan to write a blog about how to photograph it. My response has been that, having photographed exactly one…
From sleep depravation to empty stomachs, nature photographers will endure lots of discomfort to get their shots. Another source of photographic misery is extreme weather—in fact, one way to distinguish photographers from tourists is their response to rain: while the tourist packs up and races for shelter when the rain starts, the photographer grabs a camera and bolts outside. This isn’t simply some pointless…
Making Mountains, Kilauea, Hawaii Sony a7R V Sony 100-400 GM ISO 1600 f/5.6 1/500 second As a rule, landscape photographers resent being told “you’re so lucky to have seen that.” We work very hard to get to our scenes in just the right conditions, and to create the compositions with the exposure settings that portray them at their best. But I have to admit…
I have several childhood memories of the natural world that are forever etched in my brain. The oldest is probably the time in Yosemite when I helped my dad with an ill-advised lightning shoot atop Sentinel Dome, then later that evening, just down the road at Glacier Point, enjoyed rainbow across the face of Half Dome. Another was waking in the predawn darkness to…
After several weeks working through my New Zealand images, I’m giving myself (and you) a break from the land Down Under and returning to Yosemite. Because I absolutely refuse to visit Yosemite in summer, I returned to images from my trip in early May to photograph the dogwood, two subjects on my short-list of favorites. Looking at these Yosemite images, combined with my still…
I returned from New Zealand Saturday evening, a bit battered and bruised by jet lag and a brief but quite unpleasant battle with food poisoning (or norovirus), but nevertheless already missing this beautiful country that feels more like my home away from home each time I visit. I love everything about New Zealand—its unparalleled scenery, its friendly people, its tasty food, its pristine environment…
Once upon a time, whenever I heard a photographer say, “That’s exactly what I saw when I was there,” I’d cringe (because that’s impossible). Today, given the proliferation of AI generated and enhanced images, maybe I should rethink my perspective and just be glad that the photographer was there at all. There’s a lot of buzz in the photography world about AI and its…
In my first 14 years leading photo workshops, I never had to cancel a workshop. I have had to scramble a bit thanks to government shutdowns, hurricanes (really), closed roads, and power outages, but no cancellations. That record changed abruptly in spring 2020 when COVID-19 shut down the world, eventually costing me 14 workshops. Then, just as things started to reopen during the pandemic,…
In last week’s post I wrote about the importance of distilling a scene to its essence. I suggested that the best way to achieve this is to eliminate all but the scene’s most essential elements, and emphasized using precise cropping to banish unwanted objects to the world outside the frame. And while it could be argued that this careful cropping might be the most…
The art of subtraction Presented with a complex world, the nature photographer’s job is to identify a scene’s visually interesting elements and figure out how to use them in an image. While most photographers have no problem seeing what to include in their images, many struggle with what to leave out. But the best pictures usually work at least as much for what’s not in…
Eloquent Images by Gary Hart 