Vive la Différence

I’m often awed by the powerful differences between the two locations I photograph most, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. In Yosemite Valley you’re in the midst of the scenery, surrounded on all sides by the view. But for visitors to the rim of the Grand Canyon, the view is both distant and vast. Each location offers its own one-of-kind experience, and I honestly can’t…

The Megapixel Myth

I kind of have a thing for comets As soon as I announced that I’d purchased the just-announced Sony a7SIII, people started asking why I wanted a 12 megapixel camera when I already have a 61 megapixel Sony a7RIV (two, actually). When I hear these questions, I realize the myth that megapixels are a measure of image quality is still alive. The truth is,…

Chasing Lightning at the Grand Canyon (Again)

Ten days ago my brother and I drove to the Grand Canyon to photograph the monsoon—you can read the story of our trip in my previous blog post. I don’t get tired of photographing lightning. My brother Jay and I timed last month’s trip because the forecast promised lots of lightning, and though we did indeed see a lot of lightning, most of it…

Road Trip (in the Time of Coronavirus)

With the exception of a couple of recent up-and-back trips to photograph Comet NEOWISE (8 hours of driving for 1-2 hours of photography), photography-wise I have been pretty much homebound since March. I’d been keeping my fingers crossed that things would stabilize enough for me to do my Grand Canyon Monsoon photo workshops in August, but two weeks ago circumstances forced me to reschedule…

Breathtaking Comet NEOWISE

When I was ten, my best friend Rob and I spent most of our daylight hours preparing for our spy careers—crafting and exchanging coded messages, surreptitiously monitoring classmates, and identifying “secret passages” that would allow us to navigate our neighborhood without being observed. But after dark our attention turned skyward. That’s when we’d set up my telescope (a castoff generously gifted by an astronomer…

In Defense of the Tripod

This is another 6-year-old “brand new” image, just excavated from the depths of my 2014 folder Photography without compromise If you think the main reason to use a tripod is to avoid camera-shake, you’re mistaken. In this day of phenomenal high ISO performance and stabilized bodies and lenses, acceptable hand-held sharpness is possible in the vast majority of images. But here’s a reality that’s tough to…

Memory Lane

So, a few weeks ago I started moving all of my images to a 72 Terabyte Synology NAS system (configured as a RAID 6). This may very well be overkill, but it’s the kind of thing that happens when your son-in-law does IT. The image storage paradigm I’m replacing was a hash of hard drives that was long on redundancy and data security, but…

Think Fast

In virtually all aspects of my life, “think fast” is rarely my default response. Rather, given a choice, I prefer evaluation and analysis to instant reaction. This think-first mindset might also explain why my favorite sport is baseball (which many consider “too slow”), and why I prefer chess and Scrabble to video games (the last video game I played was Pong). So I guess…

Random Thoughts on a Sunday Afternoon

Here’s a brand new image that’s nearly six years old. Brand new because I processed it for the first time just yesterday; six years old because I found it after loading my pre-Lightroom raw files from 2014 into Lightroom, something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time and I finally ran out of reasons not to do it. Before 2015 I did…

As the World Turns

Reclined beneath a ceiling of stars, at the foot of a tree that matured long before the time of Christ, it’s pretty difficult to feel important. That sense of awe is why I love making images that juxtapose the ancient bristlecones against the Milky Way. But, with a 40% moon parked in Sagittarius and completely washing out the brilliant galactic center, I had other plans…