Rise and Shine

Imagine a world unmarred by the din of civilization, a world so quiet you can hear nature’s every stirring, where each breath carries a pristine bouquet of subtle fragrances and the sky is a continuously shifting kaleidoscope of indigo, blue, yellow, orange, and pink. Not a fantasy dreamscape or a garden planet in a galaxy far, far away, I’m describing the world just beyond…

A Peek Behind the Curtain

A particular highlight of my annual Eastern Sierra photo workshop is our sunrise shoot at North Lake. Made famous as the default desktop image for macOS High Sierra, North Lake is a small lake in the shadow of snow-capped Eastern Sierra peaks, near the top of Bishop Creek Canyon a little west of Bishop. It’s encircled by aspen, and reflections in its sheltered bowl…

Older Than History

Ask people to name California’s state tree and I’m afraid most would go strait to the palm tree—which isn’t even native to the Golden State. And though the correct answer is the redwood, those of us born and raised in California might argue that the stately oaks that dominate the foothills throughout most of the state conjure the strongest feelings of home. But without…

Fire and Rainbow

One concern about returning to the same location, at the same time, in the same workshop, is finding something new to photograph. But last month’s Hawaii workshop group was so excited about our first shoot of the Kilauea eruption, going back on the workshop’s final night was a no-brainer. Not only were we looking forward viewing the fountaining lava one more time, we all…

Let It Rain

From sleep depravation to empty stomachs, nature photographers will endure lots of discomfort to get their shots. Another source of photographic misery is extreme weather—in fact, one way to distinguish photographers from tourists is their response to rain: while the tourist packs up and races for shelter when the rain starts, the photographer grabs a camera and bolts outside. This isn’t simply some pointless…

Sometimes It’s Better To Be Lucky Than Good

Making Mountains, Kilauea, Hawaii Sony a7R V Sony 100-400 GM ISO 1600 f/5.6 1/500 second As a rule, landscape photographers resent being told “you’re so lucky to have seen that.” We work very hard to get to our scenes in just the right conditions, and to create the compositions with the exposure settings that portray them at their best. But I have to admit…

Storm Chasing Grand Canyon Style

Before returning to the Hawaii trip, I want to wrap up my Grand Canyon trip with another image from the wonderful lightning show on the last night of the second workshop. I wrote about this evening, and the frustrations that preceded it, in my August 29 “Feast or Famine” post. I’ve actually processed three of my favorite lightning strikes from that evening, and it…

I Was There

I have several childhood memories of the natural world that are forever etched in my brain. The oldest is probably the time in Yosemite when I helped my dad with an ill-advised lightning shoot atop Sentinel Dome, then later that evening, just down the road at Glacier Point, enjoyed rainbow across the face of Half Dome. Another was waking in the predawn darkness to…

Here Comes the Sunstar

As striking as they might be, some people find sunstars (AKA, diffraction spikes, sunbursts, or starbursts)  gimmicky and cliché. When I (and pretty much any other landscape photographer) arrive at a location, of course I hope for some combination of dramatic clouds, vivid color, and soft light. But when the sun dominates the scene, it turns out that including a sunstar is usually the…

Feast or Famine at the Grand Canyon

We had reached the final night of this year’s second and final Grand Canyon monsoon photo workshop. To say that I’d spent the weeks leading up to this year’s workshops monitoring the Grand Canyon weather forecast, praying for the monsoon storms that bring lightning, would be a gross understatement—but despite all this vigilance and no small amount of strategic scrambling during the workshop, we’d…