Where the wild things grow

Hawaii isn’t all beaches, sunsets, and palm trees. One of the first things to strike me each time I visit the lush (Hilo) side of the Big Island is the abundance of wild flora considered “exotic” back home. Here, nobody thinks twice about roadside hibiscus, bougainvillea, impatiens, or orchids that would (at the very least) require a trip to Home Depot and months of…

Moonlight on the water

Not a lot of time for blogging right now. I’m in Hawaii for 2 1/2 weeks, leading two photo workshops on the Big Island. Yesterday we departed for sunrise at 4:45 and went pretty much straight through sunset (and beyond), with only a short break for breakfast. We started just as early today, but since we’re staying out late to photograph the Kilauea Caldera…

Familiarity breeds content

Content (con-tent‘): A state of peaceful happiness…. I’ve photographed Mt. Whitney from the Alabama Hills in sunlight and moonlight, in scorching heat and drifting snow. Sharing favorite spots here with a workshop group is as rewarding as a solitary night under the stars. I’ve never photographed in the Alabama Hills without feeling better afterward than I did when I started. These feelings aren’t unique to the…

Almost Heaven

On the first night of Don Smith’s Big Sur workshop last week, Don and I gathered our group at (aptly named) Hurricane Point above Bixby Bridge for a round of night photography. While the stars were already out in force as we set up, the last light of day persevered on the western horizon, softly illuminating the sea of fog blanketing the Pacific. The…

Rules are great, but….

Rules are important. The glue of civilization. Bedtimes, homework, and curfews constrained our childhood and taught us to self-police to the point where as adults we’re so conditioned that we honor rules simply because we’ve been told to. (Who hasn’t waited two minutes for a signal to change with no car or cop in sight?) As important as this conditioning is to the preservation of…

Blurred water: Fiction and facts

Some people don’t like the silky water effect. While I agree that at times it verges on cliché, the truth is that fast water illuminated by anything less than full sunlight usually offers little choice. In those conditions the question isn’t whether to blur the water, it’s how much? The argument against blurring moving water that always amuses me is the one that says…

Cameras are stupid, Part deux

Okay, let’s review. Would you really allow your camera to choose the focus point for this composition? (Hint: No.) Like exposure, focus is not an absolute that can be determined by sterile, binary analysis; rather, focus is a creative choice that profoundly affects the result. That’s because creating the illusion of depth in two-dimensional image means composing elements at different distances throughout the frame. Unfortunately,…

Cameras are stupid

In a previous life I spent several years doing technical support. For me job-one was convincing people that, despite all error messages to the contrary, they are in fact smarter than their computers. Most errors occur because the computer just didn’t understand: If I misspell a wurd, you still know what I mean (rite?); not so with a computer. A computer can’t anticipate, reason,…

Reach for the sky

I’d love to say that every picture I take is a personal synergy of preparation, inspiration, and execution, but I’m afraid it just isn’t so. Sometimes I just go out with no real plan, and no clue about what’s going to happen. Other times my plan is no more than to find out exactly what will happen. Several years ago  (let’s see, it was probably…

Discover your inner Magellan

Sometimes I wonder if humans’  inherent need for discovery has been dulled by the proliferation of artificial stimuli. Television, movies, the Internet, and video games are indeed pretty amazing, but if Magellan were alive today, do you think he’d be riveted to “The Discovery Channel” or hunched at his computer, probing Google Earth? If Magellan had a camera, would he be online mining GPS coordinates…