(Really) Big Moon

This is an updated version of the “Big Moon” article from my Photo Tips section, plus the story of this image (below) Nothing draws the eye quite like a large moon, bright and bold, above a striking foreground. But something happens when you try to photograph the moon—somehow, a moon that looks to the eye like you could reach out and pluck it from…

Fall Color Photography Tips

This is the second of my two-part fall color series Read part one: The Why, How, and When of Fall Color Vivid color and crisp reflections make autumn my favorite season for creative photography. While most landscape scenes require showing up at the right time and hoping for the sun and clouds to cooperate, photographing fall color can be as simple as circling your subject until…

The Why, How, and When of Fall Color

Autumn is right around the corner. To get things started, I’ve updated a previous post that demystifies why, how, and when of fall color. Few things get a photographer’s heart racing more than the vivid yellows, oranges, and reds of autumn. And the excitement isn’t limited to photographers—to appreciate that reality, just try navigating New England backroads on a Sunday afternoon in the fall. Innkeeper…

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…