Near, Middle, Far

I’m in Yosemite for a workshop so my blogging time is significantly curtailed, but let’s see what happens… Photography is the futile attempt to render a three dimensional world in a two dimensional medium. It’s “futile” because including actual depth in a photograph is literally impossible. But impossible doesn’t mean hopeless. One of the simplest things photographers can do to elevate their images is think…

Variations on a Scene

One million words January 2023 will mark the start of my (more or less weekly) Eloquent Nature blog’s 13th year. Not counting the 30 or so sporadically created Photo Tips articles, today’s post will be number 710. Doing the math, that actually turns out to be more than 1 blog post per week; at 1500 words per post (a conservative estimate), I’ve written more than 1…

No Secrets

It amuses (and frustrates) me when photographers guard their information like state secrets. Photography isn’t a competition, and I’ve always felt that the more photographers can foster a sense of community, the more everyone benefits. (I will, however, protect locations at risk of being damaged by too much attention.) With that in mind, I’m sharing below some of the photography insights I’ve learned from…

Ready or Not…

Let’s review Consistently finding great photo opportunities isn’t just luck, but neither is it a divine gift. With that in mind, I sometimes refer to “The 3 P’s of nature photography,” describing the effort and sacrifice necessary to consistently create successful landscape images: Preparation, Persistence, and Pain. Preparation is your foundation, the research you do that puts you in the right place at the right time,…

Long Shot

Imagine you have a guitar and want to make music your career. Since Eric Clapton is your favorite artist, and “Let It Rain” is your favorite song, you you work hard until you can play it perfectly. But wait—before you move on to “Layla,” let me suggest that your best path to musical fame and fortune is not to replicate the works others, no…

Natural Light Painting

Once upon a time, moonlight was the only kind of night photography I did. As lifelong astronomy enthusiast, I’ve always been mesmerized by all the stars that come out when the moon is down, but film and the earliest digital cameras were just not capable of adequately capturing the world after dark without help from multiple exposures or artificial light (dealbreakers for me). While…

Surf’s Up

To prove that Hawaii Big Island photography isn’t all just magma, Milky Way, and macro, I’m sharing this image from last month’s workshop on my favorite Hawaiian island. With all due respect to Big Sur, the combination of shimmering tide pools and rugged black basalt hammered by violent surf makes Hawaii’s Puna Coast the most beautiful coastline I’ve ever seen. What especially thrills me…

Intimate Beauty

One of my favorite things about Hawaii’s Big Island is the diversity of the photo opportunities—not just its variety of beautiful subjects, but also the opportunities to apply many different types of nature photography. Between Kilauea, the Milky Way, black sand beaches, rugged coastline, numerous waterfalls, and an entire nursery-worth of exotic flowers, I have no problem employing every lens in my bag on…

In a Fog

Born and raised in California, my relationship with fog is both long and complex. I spent the first 12 years of my life in the San Joaquin Valley, where winter “tule fog” could be so thick that sometimes drivers could only navigate by opening the door and hanging their head out to follow the yellow line. Accidents involving dozens of cars were common. In…

Wait for it…

Landscape photographers have a couple of ways to make nice images. By far the most important is the ability to see the special but less obvious, then know how to compose and expose that special vision in ways that clarify and convey the previously unseen beauty. But sometimes we just need to know when to show up and where to point the camera, and…