Making the Scene

Every photographer loves creating unique images. Planning workshops more than a year in advance, I always try to maximize my groups’ chances for macro events might enable my group to capture something special—things like Horsetail Fall or a moonrise in Yosemite, lightning at Grand Canyon, the Milky Way in New Zealand or Grand Canyon, and the northern lights in Iceland. (I’m not complaining,) but…

Surprise Sunset

Greetings from Iceland. Running a workshop that starts before the sun and often goes deep into the night doesn’t leave a lot of time for blogging. But I want to share this image from earlier this month in Yosemite, along with a few paragraphs about its capture. We all long for drama in our landscape images, and I try to time each of my…

Full Contact Photography

Years ago, my brother Jay and I were photographing an autumn sunrise at Mono Lake’s South Tufa. Among the first to arrive at the lake, we’d set up at the spot I’d chosen the prior evening, but soon South Tufa’s shoreline was jammed with jostling, elbow-to-elbow photographers. Scanning the line of overlapping tripod legs, I was baffled because, unlike many popular photo destinations, South…

The Method To My Madness

Last Saturday I did a Zoom presentation for a camera club in Texas. My topic was seeing the world the way your camera sees it, a frequently recurring theme for me, but preparing for and delivering this presentation put it in the front of my mind as I processed this image from my recent Hawaii Big Island workshop. Most of us know the feeling…

New Zealand Rocks

(Yes it does.) This New Zealand winter morning dawned damp and gray, with a layer of low clouds hindering the light and obscuring the peaks. Not awful for photography, but far from the spectacular color and light photographers hope for. My workshop partner Don Smith was battling a nasty (non-Covid) virus, so I was solo with the group on the morning we visited an…

Feeding My Muse

Ode to the Coffee Table Book I grew up in an era when coffee table books were a thing. For decades, these dense rectangular blocks, packed with thick, glossy pages containing far more picture than text, dominated living rooms across America. Whether acquired by purchase or gift, once installed on a coffee table, most coffee table books would rest unopened for years, virtually untouched…

Visualize the Future

Virtually every scene I approach with a camera is beautiful, but a beautiful scene isn’t enough if all the parts don’t work together. Human experience of the world differs greatly from what the camera captures—the photographer’s job is to understand and use those differences. Ansel Adams and visualization Most photographers know that Ansel Adams visualized his final print, and the darkroom work necessary to…

Permission To Suck

True story: I once had a Yosemite workshop participant meter an El Capitan reflection scene, put her Nikon D4 in continuous-frame mode, then press the shutter and spray in a 180 degree (10 FPS) arc until the image buffer filled. Unable to contain my dismay, I asked her what she was doing and she just shrugged and said (with a smile), “It’s Yosemite—there’s sure…

Dark and Early

The key to successful sunrise photography is arriving early—dark and early. Not just to photograph the early morning twilight, but to familiarize yourself with the surroundings to be ready for whatever the rapidly changing morning light delivers. Exactly how early is “dark and early”? Well, another way of looking at it would be, if you can navigate without a flashlight, you’re too late. I…

Rise and Shine

Imagine a world unmarred by the din of civilization, a world so quiet you can hear nature’s every stirring, where each breath carries a pristine bouquet of subtle fragrances and the sky is a continuously shifting kaleidoscope of indigo, blue, yellow, orange, and pink. Not a fantasy dreamscape or a garden planet in a galaxy far, far away, I’m describing the world just beyond…