Taking One for the Team…

If there’s one thing every nature photographer agrees on, it’s this: Before the really good stuff can happen, someone needs to take one for the team. In other words, the truly spectacular (sunset, aurora, rainbow, lightning, and so on.) display everyone hopes for will not happen unless, 1) someone who could have been there opts out, or 2) at least one person gives up…

A Different Kind of Cat Herding

With my April Yosemite workshop starting in less than three hours, I was experiencing more than my normal (mild) pre-workshop anxiety. But after 20 years of photo workshops, I’ve accepted that I will always be a little stressed about the unknown until we start: how will this group of strangers connect, and what kind of photography conditions will we have? Guiding a diverse group…

Plot Twist

One overcast autumn evening in Yosemite, I wandered an isolated trail on the bank of the Merced River with my 100-400 lens, searching for intimate scenes to isolate. Spotting an assortment of colorful leaves clinging to a beautifully textured log, an opportunity materialized in my mind. Though my eyes could see the log and leaves mingling with a reflection of overhanging branches and yellow…

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…

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…

Stupid Things I’ve Done

Wearing the mantle “professional” saddles pro photographers with an image that isn’t necessarily justified. For example, consider the perception that we never make stupid mistakes. Well, I’m here to disabuse you of that notion, at least as far as this professional photographer is concerned. Stuff happens. No photographer, no matter how proficient, is immune to those little mental hiccups that dog our daily photography…

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…

This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

I was planning to just write a brief Horsetail Fall update following last week’s workshop, but before I get into that, a couple of recent experiences have me wanting to say a few words about the bad photographer behavior I witness in my many travels. The first occurred in Iceland, where Don Smith and I, along with our tour guides Albert Dros and Vincenzo…

Playing the Cards You’re Dealt

In family hearts games when I was a kid, I loved to “shoot the moon” (tremendous reward for success, extreme cost for failure). But simply wanting to shoot the moon wasn’t enough to make it happen, and I didn’t really start winning until I learned to separate my desires from the reality in my hand—I know now to evaluate my cards when they’re dealt, set a strategy, then…