A Different Kind of Thrilling

Chasing tornadoes is undeniably thrilling, but photographers don’t live by thrills alone. Or maybe a better way to put that would be, thrills don’t necessarily need to set your heart racing. Because after nearly 2 weeks chasing supercells and their (thrilling) progeny, I was only home for a couple of days before jetting off to New Zealand for a completely different kind of thrills….

That’s a Wrap

Photographing blue-sky California as much as I do, it seems that I spend much of my life strategizing, hoping, praying, and sometimes even begging (whatever it takes) for a quality sky to complement the Golden State’s spectacular scenery. So the irony wasn’t lost on me when my June storm chasing group spent nearly two weeks under absolutely jaw dropping skies, strategizing, hoping, praying and…

Days of Lightning Passed

So. Here I am, back from my Grand Canyon monsoon workshop, isolated at home with Covid. I usually return from these workshops, hit the ground running, and find myself longing for more time to process all my new lightning images. Ironic that the one time circumstances force me to slow down and lay low, providing tons of time to process my new lighting bounty,…

The Show Must Go On

Greetings from Grand Canyon. A big part of nature photography is anticipation and planning. And with planning comes expectations. Sadly, expectations often don’t live up to reality, so another big part of nature photography is how you handle the situations when expectations aren’t met. To those people who preempt disappointment by simply avoiding expectations (after all, if you don’t have expectations, you can’t be…

Bracketing, My Way

Bracketing then and now Remember the uneasy days of film, when we never knew whether we had exposed a scene properly until the film returned from the lab? So as insurance, we’d bracket our exposures, starting with the exposure we believed to be right, then hedge our bets by capturing the same composition at lighter and darker exposure values. Today, digital capture gives us…

Storm Chasing Diary: Saving the Best For Last

I’ve really enjoyed sharing my storm chasing images and experiences with everyone here on my blog, but need to end this “Storm Chasing Diary” series so I can return to some the unprocessed images from other recent trips. So the “last” referred to in the title is the series, not the images, which will keep coming as time permits. “Best” is a very subjective…

Storm Chasing Diary: Lucky Strike

How does one capture an image of a brilliant lightning bolt splitting the inverted prisms of a double rainbow? (No, not with AI or a composite—that’s cheating.) If you said luck, you’d be right—well, at least half right. But, right or not, there’s no surer way to elicit a defensive response from a nature photographer than to blurt some version of, “You were so…

Gone, But Not Forgotten

Grand Canyon Lodge, North Rim (1928 – 2025) The images I share in this post were all captured on the North Rim of Grand Canyon, a place I’ve visited and photographed more times than I can count. And while Grand Canyon Lodge is no more, the North Rim will recover, thrive, and ultimately outlast us all. Yesterday I woke to the devastating news that…

Storm Chasing Diary: More Tornadoes

A month ago I shared an image of my very first tornado. As exciting as that experience was, it turns out that was only the beginning…. When a large supercell reaches maturity, the urgency among storm chasers seems to ratchet up exponentially. So one indelible lesson from my first storm chasing experience is that there’s no time to bask in your success, no matter…

And Now for Something Completely Different…

I’ve been hyper-focused on my storm chasing images for nearly a month, and while I’m far from finished with them, I thought I’d take a brief break from those thrills to share a far more tranquil image from last month’s New Zealand workshop. What I most appreciated while processing this simple reflection, especially after being fully immersed in images of lightning and tornadoes, is…