Lights, Camera, Action!

A couple of posts back I wrote about Nature’s gifts, natural phenomena that sometimes augment the ordinary enough to defy belief. In that post I cited reflections, relatively ubiquitous phenomena that improve nearly every scene they touch. Toward the other end of the commonness continuum are auroras, colorful lights that dance randomly in the frigid darkness high above Earth’s extreme latitudes. While everyone has seen reflections, many…

Nature’s Gifts: Reflections

Sometimes Nature delivers us something that’s so beautiful, it just has to be a gift. When we think of Nature’s gifts, it’s often in terms of locations, like Yosemite or Grand Canyon (gifts indeed!). But today I’m thinking about Nature’s transient beauty: the perfect arc and vivid colors of a rainbow, a brilliant crimson sunrise or sunset, or an aurora dancing among the stars…

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…

Secure Your Borders

It’s easy to be overwhelmed at the first sight of a location you’ve longed to visit for years. And since by the time you make it there you’ve likely seen so many others’ images of the scene, it’s understandable that your perception of how the scene should be photographed might be fixed. But is that really the best way to photograph it? Valley View in Yosemite…

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…

It’s a Wide, Wonderful World

I used to consider my 16-35 lens ultra-wide (by many definitions, it is), and as such, all the focal width I needed—the difference between 12mm and 16mm didn’t seem enough to justify another lens. I photographed in blissful ignorance until 2015, when, on a spring morning in Yosemite, I borrowed a friend’s Canon 11-24 lens. With the help of my Metabones adapter, I mounted…

Making a Scene

Think about what goes into making a landscape image. If the scenes and conditions are our raw materials, then it would be logical to say that our camera gear is our tools. But in addition to cameras, lenses, and other physical photography hardware, I’d say that our photography toolkit also includes the techniques we employ to deal with nature’s fickle whims. And speaking of…

Still Motion

Put me firmly in the camp of those who prefer reading the book to watching the movie. Watching a movie, my gaze is fixed as the scene unfurls before my eyes at a predetermined pace—if something requires scrutiny or triggers my imagination, I have to pause or rewind (often not an option—or at the very least, a source of irritation to others in the room)….

Breaking Murphy’s Law

Rain Curtain Lightning, Lipan Point, Grand Canyon Sony a7RIV Sony 24-105 G 1/8 second F/9 ISO 160 Things go wrong. Or, as more succinctly attributed to 20th century aerospace engineer Edward Murphy, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” In my previous post I wrote about some of the physical hardships nature photographers endure while chasing their shots. This got me thinking about…