Grand Finale

For most of my full moon workshops, I try to schedule the moonrise main event for the workshop’s final sunset. Sometimes other factors prevent this (for example, in Yosemite I try to avoid weekends), but when the schedule works, a nice moonrise gives the group something exciting to anticipate throughout the workshop. This becomes especially important when some or all of the workshop’s hoped-for…

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…

Isolate and Conquer

For years (decades), especially in autumn, Bridalveil Creek has been my go-to Yosemite location for intimate images that eschew cliché. Then, 2018, the entire area closed for 5 years to undergo a much needed facelift. Despite the magnitude of this overhaul—repaved, rerouted, and brand new trails and vistas; repaved parking; and (finally!) bathrooms with flush toilets (including the new water and sewer lines to…

I’m Not Crazy, I Swear…

Crazy is as crazy does In college, my best friend and I drove from San Francisco to San Diego so he could attend a dental appointment he’d scheduled before his recent move back to the Bay Area. We drove all night, 10 hours, arriving at 7:55 a.m. for his 8:00 a.m. appointment (more luck than impeccable timing). I dozed in the car while he…

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…

The Joy of Sunrise

Most people who rise before the sun do it because they have to. And sadly, because we’ve been so conditioned by a lifetime of rising for school and work, rushing to “pressing” obligations, the joys of early mornings never seem to outweigh the pleasure of staying in bed. While I won ‘t pretend that I truly relish a 4:30 a.m. alarm, not only have…

Channeling Your Camera’s Vision

About a month ago I wrapped up my ninth Grand Canyon raft trip. As my guides and I get better at identifying the best spots and when to be there, there’s an aspect of similarity from trip to trip, but thanks to group dynamics, weather conditions, and the secondary stops we chose to make on any given year, each trip always feels unique. As…

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…