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…

2018 Highlights

I’ve always struggled with the “top-whatever” end-of-year countdown of my favorite images because the choices are so subjective and mood dependent, and so many images are favorites as much for their memories as they are for their aesthetic value. And coming up with a predetermined number is arbitrary, and inevitably requires choices I don’t want to make and will almost certainly regret later. One…

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…

Shoot the Moon

Nothing draws the eye quite like a large moon, bright and bold, with a striking foreground. But something happens when you try to photograph the moon—somehow a moon that looks to the eye like you could reach out and pluck it from the sky, shrinks to a small white speck in a photo. While a delicate accent of moon is great when properly framed…

Where there’s smoke…

Humans, we have a problem Earth’s climate is changing, and the smoking gun belongs to us. Sadly, in the United States policy lags insight and reason, and the world is suffering. Climate change science is complex, with many moving parts that make it difficult to communicate to the general public. Climate change also represents a significant reset for some of the world’s most profitable…

Waiting for the Stars

The bristlecone pines are among the oldest living organisms on earth. Some of these trees pre-date the Roman Empire by 2000 years—and they look every year of their age. The more harsh a bristlecone’s environment, the longer it lives. As with the giant redwoods, it’s humbling to be among the bristlecone pines. What they lack in bulk they make up for in character, with…

Fresh Takes

I love the iconic captures as much as the next person—scenes like Yosemite’s Horsetail Fall in February, Upper Antelope Canyon’s famous light shaft, or McWay Fall’s tumble into the Pacific, are both gorgeous and a thrill to photograph. But standing elbow-to-elbow with hundreds (or thousands!) of photographers, each recording virtually identical images that are already duplicates of thousands of prior images, while nice, doesn’t necessarily stimulate my…

It’s the People

The ability to earn my living visiting the most beautiful places in the world is plenty of reason for gratitude, but that’s not what I’m thinking about today. Today I’m thinking about all of the people my workshops have connected me with, and all the laughter and learning they have added to my life. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward…

Taking Yosemite for Granite (sorry)

Yosemite, like most of the Sierra Nevada, was carved from an intrusive igneous rock (subterranean magma that cooled without reaching the surface). This subterranean magma cooled slowly enough for its primary constituents, quartz and feldspar, plus mica and other minerals, to form crystals that fuse into an extremely hard matrix: granite. The granite waited patiently in the dark while overhead oceans advanced and receded,…