Macro in Spirit

It’s poppy season in California, and this is turning out to be a banner year. I’ve already enjoyed one nice poppy shoot, but things are just getting started in Northern California so I hope there are more to come. When I photograph poppies, I don’t always use my macro lens. Even though my objective is similar to what I’d accomplish with a macro lens—a…

Let There Be Light

In January I made my first visit to Iceland in preparation for the winter workshop I’ll be doing there with Don Smith next January. And after a lifetime spent in the middle latitudes, one thing that was impossible to ignore was the quality of the winter light at 65º (-ish) latitude. Not only do sunrises and sunset last forever, but during our entire visit…

Yosemite in a Raindrop

I’ve been to Valley View in Yosemite about a million times. For those not familiar with Yosemite Valley, Valley View (sometimes called Gates of the Valley) is the classic view of El Capitan, Cathedral Rocks, and Bridalveil Fall, with the Merced River in the foreground, that represents Yosemite in countless calendars, postcards, and advertisements. Though all this attention is justified, after a million visits…

Creative Selective Focus (revisited)

After a winter that didn’t seem like it would ever end, spring has finally arrived in California. With poppies springing up throughout the state, and the dogwood bloom right around the corner, this seemed like a good time to update my Creative Selective Focus article. In this day of ubiquitous cameras, automatic exposure modes, free information, and powerful processing tools, taking a good picture…

Expose yourself

With advanced exposure and metering capabilities, cameras seem to be getting “smarter” every year. So smart, in fact, that for most scenes, getting the exposure right is a simple matter of pointing your camera and clicking the shutter button. That’s fine if all you care about is recording a memory, but not only is there more to your exposure decision than getting the amount…

Get Out of the Way

(And Let the Scene Speak for Itself) As aggressively as I seek creative ways to express nature with my camera, and as important as I think that is, sometimes a scene is so beautiful that it’s best to just get out of the way and let the scene speak for itself. I had one of those experiences last month at Tunnel View in Yosemite….

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…