Image Building (the old fashioned way)

Today it’s possible to open an app on your computer, type in a few descriptive terms, and faster than you can take a sip of coffee your very own beautiful image will appear. No frozen extremities, missed meals, or sleep deprivation required. What could possibly be better than that? I’ll tell you what’s better: the frozen extremities, missed meals, and sleep deprivation necessary to…

Tunnel Vision

For  everyone who woke up today thinking, “Gee, I sure wish there were more Yosemite pictures from Tunnel View,” you’ve come to the right place. Okay, seriously, the world probably doesn’t actually need any more Tunnel View pictures, but that’s not going to stop me. Visitors who burst from the darkness of the Wawona Tunnel like Dorothy stepping from her monochrome farmhouse into the…

Relationship Building

It’s all about relationships I write a lot about relationships in photography. Often I’m referring relationships with my subjects, which could mean gaining better understanding of a location—not just the where and when of its photo opportunities, but its weather and geology (especially), as well as its flora, fauna, and history. (Of course I love visiting new places too, but I’ve never felt particularly driven…

Leveraging Light

In last week’s post I wrote about the importance of distilling a scene to its essence. I suggested that the best way to achieve this is to eliminate all but the scene’s most essential elements, and emphasized using precise cropping to banish unwanted objects to the world outside the frame. And while it could be argued that this careful cropping might be the most…

Distilling the Essence

The art of subtraction Presented with a complex world, the nature photographer’s job is to identify a scene’s visually interesting elements and figure out how to use them in an image. While most photographers have no problem seeing what to include in their images, many struggle with what to leave out. But the best pictures usually work at least as much for what’s not in…

Happy Photography

Sometimes I start a blog post with a very clear idea of what I want to say, and other times I have no idea what I want to say and just go where my mind takes me. I’ll let you decide which this one is. Digital manipulation has become so widespread that it threatens the credibility of honestly earned images. And now we’re starting…

Spring is a State of Mind

According to the calendar, today is the first day of spring—so…, Happy Spring! On the other hand, here in Northern California Mother Nature is delivering very mixed signals. A few trees are blooming, and every few days the sun pops out long enough to forgo a jacket or sweater—but the rain still seems to be coming several times a week, which means (lots of) snow…

Perfect Timing

In the Alabama Hills to photograph sunrise in neck-craning proximity to the Sierra Crest, I knew precisely what time, on this date, the sun’s first rays would color the towering granite, and exactly when a 98% moon would would disappear behind the left flank of Mt. Williamson, California’s second highest peak. Clocks and calendars enable us to time some aspects of our lives, like sunrises…

It’s All About the People

As I’ve made abundantly clear in earlier blog posts, 2023 started with my busiest ever workshop stretch. But I’ve finally reached enough of a lull in my schedule to start processing the fruits of all this labor—not nonstop, but maybe one or two images a day if I’m lucky. Part of me feels a little overwhelmed by how how long it could take at…

You Had to Be There

I was never one of those analog purists who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the digital world. Despite a pretty extensive and carefully curated album collection, I jumped into the CD revolution early (1980) and with both feet, then embraced the transition to MP3 and subsequent digital audio formats with similar fervor. (Part of me still longs for the sound of…