Taking One for the Team…

If there’s one thing every nature photographer agrees on, it’s this: Before the really good stuff can happen, someone needs to take one for the team. In other words, the truly spectacular (sunset, aurora, rainbow, lightning, etc.) display everyone hopes for will not happen unless, 1) someone who could have been there opts out, or 2) at least one person gives up and leaves….

A Different Kind of Cat Herding

With my April Yosemite workshop starting in less than three hours, I was experiencing more than my normal (mild) pre-workshop anxiety. But after 20 years of photo workshops, I’ve accepted that I will always be a little stressed about the unknown until we start: how will this group of strangers connect, and what kind of photography conditions will we have? Guiding a diverse group…

Going Out a Winner

There was nothing easy about this picture. Milky Way photography in general is a challenge, but trying it at the bottom of Grand Canyon is especially harrowing. In addition to the standard Milky Way photography difficulties, like insufficient light essential for composition and focus, any kind of night photography at the bottom of a mile-deep hole adds another level of dark. In this extreme…

Moon Chasing

Many years ago I stood with a couple of other photographers on Sentinel Bridge in Yosemite. It was a few minutes before sunset and we were waiting, cameras poised, for the moon to ascend from behind Half Dome. As we chatted, a young woman approached and asked no one in particular what we were all waiting for. When I told her about the imminent…

Open Mind and Open Eyes

As landscape photographers, it’s easy to arrive at a photo location with a preconceived idea of what we’re going to shoot. That’s often because there’s a single perspective that gets all the attention, dominating the images of the location shared online and skewing the perception of what its images should look like. At Mono Lake, despite its sprawling layout with lake views that span…

Hold My Gear (the Sequel)

After sharing in my prior post that I’ve been lugging a 30 pound camera bag through airports, it occurred to me that I haven’t updated you on the ever-changing contents of said camera bag lately. But before I continue, let me remind you that a photographer’s gear choice is no more relevant to his images than a writer’s pen is to her stories, or…

Ruminating on my Workflow—Both Digital and Analog

In one of the training sessions during last week’s Yosemite Spring Waterfalls and Dogwood photo workshop, someone asked about my digital workflow. During my (riveting) file management summary, I mentioned off-handedly that I never delete a raw file, regardless of its content. The amount of push-back I got surprised me, but it caused me to consider more closely my reasons for doing something I…

Twin Peaks

In the canon of iconic Iceland mountains, Vestrahorn is rivaled only by Kirkjufell, the much-photographed wizard-hat on Snaefellsnes Peninsula. While Kirkjufell’s acclaim is much deserved, as a photographer, one thing in particular that distinguishes Vestrahorn from Kirkjufell for me is its variety of compositional options. Kirkjufell is arguably Iceland’s most visually striking mountain, but the vantage points from which to photograph its distinctive outline…

Surprise Sunset

Greetings from Iceland. Running a workshop that starts before the sun and often goes deep into the night doesn’t leave a lot of time for blogging. But I want to share this image from earlier this month in Yosemite, along with a few paragraphs about its capture. We all long for drama in our landscape images, and I try to time each of my…

The Best Camera Is…

… The one that’s with you Yes, I know it’s a cliché, but like most clichés, this one is founded on truth. Even people like me, who pay the bills with our pictures, don’t carry our “real” cameras 24/7. In those instances, when I see beauty I deem worthy of recording, I’m happy that my iPhone (which is always with me) gives me serviceable…