Thinking Inside the Box

Roll over, Ansel Several years ago, while thumbing through an old issue of “Outdoor Photographer” magazine, I came across an article on Lightroom processing. It started with the words: “Being able to affect one part of the image compared to another, such as balancing the brightness of a photograph so the scene looks more like the way we saw it rather than being restricted…

A Horsetail of a Different Color

Last week’s Yosemite photo workshop was ostensibly about Horsetail Fall, but it turned out to be so much more than that. In fact, after photographing more snow than I’ve seen in Yosemite in many (many) years, Horsetail Fall was a bit anticlimactic. The only evening that Horsetail Fall got the coveted direct light everyone came on our second day. Going all-in on Horsetail Fall…

Love What You Shoot

Feel the love One frequently uttered piece of photographic advice is to “shoot what you love.” And while photographing the locations and subjects we love most is indeed pretty essential to consistently successful images, unless we treat our favorite subjects with the love they deserve, we risk losing them. My relationship with Yosemite predates my memories, so it’s no wonder that Yosemite Valley plays…

Escape from Yosemite

Cold, wet, exhausted, and ecstatic after a day-and-half of photographing Yosemite Valley glazed with new snow, my brother and I were ready to go home and count our treasures. Gingerly following my headlights down icy Highway 140, I rounded a bend a couple of miles downhill from the Arch Rock entrance station and found my path blocked by an iron gate spanning the road…

Seeing the Entire Scene

As you might imagine, between my own images, my photo workshop participants’ images, browsing other photographers’ pages, and simply being connected to social media, I see a lot of images. A. Lot. Of. Images. And curse or blessing, I can’t help but have opinions—whether my own images or others’, some work wonderfully, others not so much. There’s a lot that goes into creating a…

The evolution of a landscape photographer

One of my earliest photographic lessons was that clicking a picture of a beautiful subject, no matter how beautiful, does not ensure a beautiful result. A vivid sunset can indeed be quite pleasing to the eye, but picture of that sunset riddled with rooftops and telephone poles—well…, not so much. This got me thinking more about the individual components of a beautiful scene, and…

What is real?

Visual “truth” is relative Without getting too philosophical, it’s important to understand that, like your camera, your view of the universe is both limited and interpreted. In other words, there is no absolute visual truth. Instead, we (you, me, our cameras, your dentist’s dog, and so on…) each have our own view of the world that’s based on many factors—some we can control, others we…

Alone in Yosemite

Last winter I spent a glorious day by myself in Yosemite Valley, photographing the vestiges of an overnight snowstorm. Inbound to the park the evening before, a continuous strand of outbound headlights reminded me how different a photographer’s priorities are from the general public’s. For a nature photographer, the best time to be outside seems to be everyone else’s worst time to be outside,…

Just a Pinch of Moon

A couple of  weeks ago I wrote about how to photograph the moon big, the bigger the better, to overcome its tendency to (appear to) shrink in a wide angle image. But the moon doesn’t need to be big to be a striking addition to a landscape photo. To balance a landscape frame, I think in terms of “visual gravity” (or “visual weight”): how much…

Winter Moonrise

With a wide variety of spectacular and diverse east-facing views, I can think of no better place to photograph a moonrise than Yosemite. I especially like the December full moon because it aligns so well with Half Dome, not just on the night it’s full, but on the nights leading up to the full moon. When I realized that this year’s December full moon was…