Are you insane?

Are you insane? Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results. Hmmm. For some reason this reminds me of the thousands of good landscape photographers with hundreds of beautiful images they can’t sell. These photographers have a good eye for composition, own all the best equipment, know when to be at the great locations, and are virtual…

Snow Job

I’m afraid that making a living as a photographer sometimes means exchanging time to take pictures for time to make money. On the other hand, my schedule is mine alone, which means when there’s something I really, really want to photograph, such as a moonrise or fresh snow in Yosemite, I can usually arrange my schedule to make it happen. The moon shoots I…

Mirrorless Metering

Because I don’t want my camera making any decisions for me, I’ve always metered in manual mode. For most of my photography life, my manual metering approach was to start with the best f-stop for my composition, spot-meter on the brightest part of the scene, and dial my shutter speed until the meter indicated the proper tone. In my film days I sometimes hedged…

A Winter Morning in Yosemite

Missing snow so far this winter, I’m going through some of my old snow images and came across this one from a few years ago. I’d traveled to Yosemite with the promise of snow in the forecast, but the night before the trip’s final day I went to sleep to the steady hum of rain. The next morning dawned damp and gray—and gloriously silent….

Photography’s Creativity Triad: Depth

Photography’s Creativity Triad Enduring photographs don’t duplicate human reality, they reveal unseen aspects of our world. Capturing this hidden world requires mastery of photography’s “creativity triad” that distinguishes the camera’s vision from human vision: motion, light, and depth. Photography is the futile attempt to squeeze a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional medium. But just because it’s impossible to truly capture depth in a photograph, don’t…

Photography’s Creativity Triad: Motion

Photography’s Creativity Triad Enduring photographs don’t duplicate human reality, they reveal unseen aspects of our world. Capturing this hidden world requires mastery of photography’s “creativity triad” that distinguishes the camera’s vision from human vision: motion, light, and depth. Motion: Autumn Spiral The human experience of the world unfolds like a seamless movie of continuous instants, while a camera accumulates light throughout its exposure to…

Yosemite Reflections

Rather than attempt the impossible task of choosing a favorite season in Yosemite, I find it easier to identify the things I like most about each season. From colorful fall to white winter to saturated spring, Yosemite becomes a completely different place with each season. (FYI, summer is for tourists.) But regardless of the season, I think it’s Yosemite’s reflections that make me happiest….

Playing with my new toy

Leading 15-20 photo workshops per year means coming to terms with photographing the same locations year in, year out. This is not a complaint—I only guide people to locations I love photographing—but it sometimes makes me long for the opportunity to capture something new. Which is why I’m loving visiting my familiar haunts with my newest lenses, the Sony 12-24 G and Sony 100-400…

How a polarizer works

Some people couldn’t care less how a polarizer works—they’re satisfied knowing what a polarizer does, and how to make it happen. But if you’re like me, you also need to understand why things behave the way they do. Put simply… A polarizer cuts reflections. On the surface that not might seem so desirable for someone who likes photographing reflections as much as I do, but reflections…

Going wide

After years of drought, in spring of 2016 I had the good fortune to photograph Yosemite Valley with actual flooding—nothing devastating, just enough for the Merced River to overspill its banks and create reflections where meadows normally exist. One such location was a spot beneath El Capitan, where I found myself faced with the challenge of capturing more scene than my 16-35 lens could…