The Show Must Go On

Greetings from Grand Canyon. A big part of nature photography is anticipation and planning. And with planning comes expectations. Sadly, expectations often don’t live up to reality, so another big part of nature photography is how you handle the situations when expectations aren’t met. To those people who preempt disappointment by simply avoiding expectations (after all, if you don’t have expectations, you can’t be…

Storm Chasing Grand Canyon Style

Before returning to the Hawaii trip, I want to wrap up my Grand Canyon trip with another image from the wonderful lightning show on the last night of the second workshop. I wrote about this evening, and the frustrations that preceded it, in my August 29 “Feast or Famine” post. I’ve actually processed three of my favorite lightning strikes from that evening, and it…

Here Comes the Sunstar

As striking as they might be, some people find sunstars (AKA, diffraction spikes, sunbursts, or starbursts)  gimmicky and cliché. When I (and pretty much any other landscape photographer) arrive at a location, of course I hope for some combination of dramatic clouds, vivid color, and soft light. But when the sun dominates the scene, it turns out that including a sunstar is usually the…

Feast or Famine at the Grand Canyon

We had reached the final night of this year’s second and final Grand Canyon monsoon photo workshop. To say that I’d spent the weeks leading up to this year’s workshops monitoring the Grand Canyon weather forecast, praying for the monsoon storms that bring lightning, would be a gross understatement—but despite all this vigilance and no small amount of strategic scrambling during the workshop, we’d…

Where to Draw the Line

I’m in the midst of 11 days and two workshops chasing lightning at Grand Canyon. Despite daily 4:15 a.m. wake-ups, very late dinners, and lots of waiting for something to happen punctuated by bursts of extremely intense activity, I am in fact (to quote Cosmo Kramer) lovin’ every minute of it. The first workshop group photographed an assortment of monsoon thrills that included lightning,…

Beam Me Up

I won’t lie: The primary reason I go to the Grand Canyon in monsoon season—and for that matter, the primary reason most people sign up for my Grand Canyon monsoon workshops—is to photograph lightning. But as we all know, lightning is a fickle phenomenon, even during the Grand Canyon’s usually electric monsoon season. Because lightning is never guaranteed, I always do my very best…

(More) Lightning Lessons

This post is all about different aspects photographing lightning—some of the stuff I write about here is covered in much more detail in my Lightning Photo Tips article, so you might want to start there I’ve been photographing lightning at the Grand Canyon (especially) and elsewhere for 10 years, but I’m happy to say that I’m still learning. While going through my images from…

Smoke on the Landscape (and Fire in the Sky)

After 2 1/2 weeks at the Grand Canyon for three monsoon photo workshops, I’ve had very little time (and even less connectivity) for posting, but I wanted to share this image while the experience is still fresh in my mind. Here’s a new image and a short descriptive post, followed by a longer, but far more important, “refurbished” post. Beauty comes in many forms….

Last Light

It occurred to me while processing this image that, just like the lightning strike image in my previous post, this was my next-to-last image of the day. Which got me thinking about why I like these late-light images, and also about the similarities and differences between the two images. Both images were captured in conditions much darker than the final image indicates. In this…

Riding the celestial carousel

It’s pretty difficult to feel important while reclined beneath an infinite ocean of stars, peering into the depths of the Grand Canyon. Below you unfolds a cross-section of Earth’s last two billion years, chronological layers of landscape sliced by gravity’s inexorable tug on the Colorado River; overhead is a snapshot of the galaxy’s (perceived) pinwheel about the axis of our planet’s rotation. From our…