Moon Chasing

Many years ago I stood with a couple of other photographers on Sentinel Bridge in Yosemite. It was a few minutes before sunset and we were waiting, cameras poised, for the moon to ascend from behind Half Dome. As we chatted, a young woman approached and asked no one in particular what we were all waiting for. When I told her about the imminent…

Let’s Get Vertical (Again)

(This seed of today’s blog is a post from many years ago—but the image and its story are brand new.) What’s your orientation? I’ve always questioned the reasoning behind labeling horizontally oriented images, “landscape,” and vertically oriented images, “portrait.” Despite my profession as a landscape (-only) photographer, nearly half of my images use “portrait” orientation. So it concerns me that this arbitrary naming bias…

Super? Moon

This week’s full moon was a “supermoon”—or, as the media frequently proclaimed, “The biggest moon of 2025!” And while that is technically true, the size difference between a super and average moon is barely perceptible. So, as a public service, I’ve dusted off and updated a prior article explaining the supermoon phenomenon (any hyperbole)—and what better time to share it than just days after…

Ruminating on my Workflow—Both Digital and Analog

In one of the training sessions during last week’s Yosemite Spring Waterfalls and Dogwood photo workshop, someone asked about my digital workflow. During my (riveting) file management summary, I mentioned off-handedly that I never delete a raw file, regardless of its content. The amount of push-back I got surprised me, but it caused me to consider more closely my reasons for doing something I…

Surprise Sunset

Greetings from Iceland. Running a workshop that starts before the sun and often goes deep into the night doesn’t leave a lot of time for blogging. But I want to share this image from earlier this month in Yosemite, along with a few paragraphs about its capture. We all long for drama in our landscape images, and I try to time each of my…

One Night, Two Moons

I wrapped up this year’s workshop schedule at the beginning of this month and am now enjoying a much anticipated Holiday breather before my schedule ramps up again in January. This isn’t exactly a vacation, because the end of the year is when all my permit reporting and next year’s permit applications are due, and my 2025 workshop prep starts to ramp up, but…

Dome Sweet Dome

Poll 100 random people about the feature they most associate with Yosemite, and you’ll probably get a variety of answers. Near the top of the list will be El Capitan and Yosemite Falls. Bridalveil Fall might get some love too. But I’d wager more than half of the votes would go to Half Dome, both for its striking profile, and for the way it…

Happy Earth Day

My commitment for this blog is one image/post per week. With a workshop that started Sunday and ended Wednesday, I’m a little behind this week, but I made it! Next week I have a workshop that goes from Monday through Thursday, and the following week I’ll be completely off the grid rafting the Grand Canyon. But one way or the other, I’ll continue with…

The Other AI

What’s wrong with ACTUAL intelligence (the other AI)? I love all the genuine eclipse photos popping up on social media—almost as much as I DESPISE all the fake eclipse photos. Though we’ve had to deal with a glut of fabricated photos since the introduction of computers and digital capture to photography (all the way back before the turn of the 21st Century), the advent…

Moon Swoon

Given an especially intense workshop schedule to start my year, the only Yosemite workshop I originally planned for February was my annual Horsetail Fall workshop. But in early 2023 I plotted the 2024 February full moon and saw that it would appear above Yosemite Valley, directly behind Half Dome (viewed from Tunnel View), at exactly sunset on Friday, February 23. Hmmm… Checking my 2024…