Everyone knows about the slot canyons near Page Arizona, but how many know of slot canyons in California? Last week I went riding on a quad in the desert near Baker, CA with a fellow photographer in Trilogy. He knew of the whereabouts of a slot canyon. While the red colored sandstone in Arizona's canyons is more colorful, the slot canyon we visited provided an interesting display of color and contrast. Unfortunately the angle of the sun this time of year is too low to get light shafts beaming down into the canyon. Enjoy.

On August 24, 2013 I boarded the M/S Quest for a ten day photography expedition in the Svalbard Archipelago and north to the polar ice cap. During our ten days at sea we made frequent excursions on Zodiac boats, sometimes going ashore and sometimes taking pictures from the Zodiacs. We made two successful trips north to the ice pack, which covers the North Pole, searching for polar bears; our second trip took us as far north as the 82° 34’ latitude, or 450 miles from the North Pole.

This was by any measure a very successful expedition. Many expeditions are lucky if they can get close enough to take pictures of even a single polar bear, and some never even catch sight of a polar bear. On our expedition we sighted nine polar bears and seven of them were close enough to get very good photographs. In addition to polar bears we had good opportunities to photograph walrus, birds, icescapes, and landscapes.

I found the Arctic with its rugged mountains, barren landscape, soft and ever present light of the sun, ice bergs, and the wondrous pancake ice in the ice pack to be an unique experience. You have two ways you can join me on a virtual journey to the North Pole. You can:

Watch a short slideshow of my journey, including a short movie clip of the collapse of a large section of the wall of a glacier; and/or you can view the pictures from this trip in my Svalbard album. Whichever choice you make, I trust you will enjoy sharing my trip to the top of the world.

Svalbard Slide Show

Svalbard Photo Album

Recently I visited the Living Desert Museum in Palm Desert. I went with a couple of other photographers from Trilogy; Bill and Tim. This was my first trip to the Living Desert; they have a nice collection of African and Colorado Desert wildlife in addition to a nice botanical garden. While I was having fun taking pictures, my expectations were low - it was a very windy day, so flower pictures were not going to happen, and the problem with any zoo is trying to compose an animal shot without getting undesirable elements of the enclosure in the picture.

So, I was having fun but not seeing anything great. And then we came upon the cheetah enclosure. At first not much was happening. But after watching for a bit I noticed one of the cheetahs had moved to a mound of dirt in the center of the enclosure and was giving an interesting pose. So I set up the tripod and shot a picture. The cheetah was happy and stayed put, so I started working the shot, both the composition and the exposure. The result is the photograph at the top of this page.

Bill and Tim were watching me as I worked the shot, and we talked about the use of fill flash to improve the exposure and other aspects of the shot. So, I thought it might be useful to others to illustrate the steps I took to get this shot. Here goes….

This is my first attempt at the photo (as you’ll see it often takes some work before I get the composition right. Like most of you, I make a lot of mistakes and it doesn’t come naturally). I had my 70-200 lens on the camera with a 1.4x teleconverter (280 mm focal length). My initial thought was to keep some of the environment in the shot. However, the cheetahs tail was too close to the right-hand edge of the picture, so I adjusted the framing and tried again.

Better, but the rock in the picture was way too bright to my liking. So, I decided to go with my 300 mm lens and the 1.4x teleconverter (420 mm focal length). The resulting shot was a little tight, but I was able to eliminate most of the white rock.

But, I still had a couple of problems with the shot: I was losing too much of the cheetah on the right hand side of the picture, and the piece of rock in the lower left-hand corner was too distracting. Also, it was about this point in time I knew that I had to do something about the harsh shadows in the picture.

My next step was to move the tripod. I actually moved it about three times (a total of about 3 feet to the right) before I completely eliminated the rock and avoided some other distractions further left of the cheetah. Fortunately I had brought my flash with me, so I got out the flash and the Better Beamer to efficiently project the flash to the cheetah. I knew from experience that I didn’t want full strength fill flash, so I dialed in a flash exposure compensation of -2/3. However, the resulting picture looked too “flashed”, so I dialed it down some more to a setting of -1 1/3; I liked the result much better.

I then optimized the final version of the picture using my usual workflow in Photoshop. My workflow involves the usual global adjustments for exposure (white point, black point and brightness), contrast, and color balance. I also apply creative sharpening and local contrast adjustments using dodge and burn techniques. I also used a mask to selectively blur and darken the background so that it wouldn’t detract from the main subject, the cheetah.

In January I went with Joe and Mary Ann McDonald on a photography tour in Costa Rica. It was a very productive trip and I think I came back with more useable photos than from any past photo trip. Joe and Mary Ann are great photographers and they run a great tour. In Costa Rica I also had the pleasure of meeting and working with Greg Basco, another wildlife photographer. Greg went to Costa Rica as a member of the Peace Corp and decided to stay.

Shooting in the tropical climate is different. The sun comes up quickly and at a steep angle, so the soft morning light is almost non-existent. The trees and vegetation create harsh shadows and situations where the background is brightly lit, while the subject is in deep shade. We used fill flash to try and balance the exposure between the shadow and the bright background. Until this trip I had only used my flash occasionally. So, in addition to great subject matter, I had a crash course from Greg and Joe in flash photography.

For this trip I have assembled both a slideshow and a photo album. Warning, the photo album is large. Even after editing it down I ended up with 99 pictures and I couldn’t seem to reduce it further, so I put all 99 in the album. The following links will take you to either the slideshow or the album. Enjoy!

Costa Rica Slideshow

Costa Rica Photo Album

I hooked up with one of the members of the Trilogy Photography Club and we did a day trip to the area around the Salton Sea and the sand dunes near Yuma. We left early expecting to get to Bombay Bay Beach (Salton Sea) before sunrise. As it turns out we got there a little late and sunrise was in progress. As soon as we parked I grabbed my backpack and tripod and rushed over to beach to get some shots. I managed to get a couple before I lost the early tinges of sunrise.

However, all was not lost. We still had plenty of good light to work with, along with some cooperative pelicans. In addition to the birds, Bombay Beach is a great place to shoot decaying structures, pilings and other items that have been discarded and left to corrode.

Next we went to explore the mud pots in the geothermal area next to Salton Sea. The joy of spending an hour taking pictures of bubbling mud is something only a photographer can understand.

The third stop on our agenda was Salvation Mountain. Salvation Mountain is unique and hard to describe. Basically a guy named Leonard received salvation and decided to create a monument to Jesus. He started painting bible versus and pictures on a hill and constructed an interesting “house” using old tree trunks, bales of hay and other junk. Over the years many people have contributed paint to this project.

Our final stop was a tour through the sand dunes west of Yuma. We didn’t have four wheel drive, so our access to the dunes was limited. We went there just after a three day weekend, so the dunes were all covered in tracks. Still it was fun. We also visited a monument to the Plank Highway. This highway was used between 1915-1926 for cars to cross 6.5 miles of sand dunes in the area of what is now Interstate 8.

This was another fun outing. Click Here to see pictures from this outing. Enjoy.

My pictures from the Tanzania Safari have been patiently waiting. Over the past month I’ve found that I am finally ready to embrace these pictures and the memories (mostly wonderful) attached to them. As I started to review my collection of about 8000 pictures from this trip I knew I was in trouble: how do I best approach for sharing them with others? Of course the natural answer is to create a travelogue for this trip along with a somewhat larger album of photos from the trip. However, a travelogue can only be enjoyed on the computer and a number of friends have expressed interest in prints. So, after some thought, I decided that I would try a new approach and create a wall calendar for 2012.

I wanted the pictures in the calendar to be a reasonable size so that they could be enjoyed, so I decided to compose the calendar using only 13 pictures - one for the cover and one for each of the 12 months of the year. The next problem to be addressed is which 13 pictures? So, I pondered the question for a bit and decided that I would use Barb for inspiration; this seemed to be a fitting way to remember her last trip. So, the pictures that I have selected are ones that I think she would have chosen among her favorites from the trip. And while not everything we saw is represented in the calendar, the 13 pictures do, I think, provide a nice summary of the Africa that we love.

The final detail that I had to address with the calendar was whether or not to annotate the pictures. I think the pictures that we’ve (we because Barb’s spirit is helping me out on this one) selected stand on their own and don’t need a title or description. However, I did feel that appropriate quotations would supplement the calendar. So, I made a decision to attach a quotation to each of the pictures. I choose to select religious quotations, mostly from the bible, that complemented the picture and were ones with which I think Barb would have agreed.

So, the art production work on the calendar is done and I’m in the process of working through the mechanical details required to get it printed. It will be ready for distribution in late January. Since our trip ended in February, and Barb went to her heavenly home in February, it seemed fitting to start the calendar with the month of February.

I will be giving some copies of the calendar away to family and friends. I will make copies available to others that request it. Most on-line services want $15-20 to print a calendar, but I think I can get it done for about $9 by printing it at Staples. So, if you want a calendar please let me know and I’ll send you a message when the calendars are ready. Who knows, you might get lucky and get one as a gift. You can request one by commenting on this blog entry and by sending me an email message (see link on Home page).

In October I traveled to the Scottish Highlands for some landscape photography. Upon hearing about my trip to Scotland I usually get asked about the golfing in Scotland, however, as my golfing buds know, while I enjoy getting out for a round of golf I don’t enjoy it enough to plan a trip around golf or to pack my golf clubs along. The sole purpose of this trip was landscape photography and I limited the scope of my trip to solely the Scottish Highlands.

My original plans for this trip involved a PODAS Workshop (Phase One Digital Artist Series) in the southern region of the Highlands around Fort Williams, Scotland. This workshop offered a chance to try out a Phase One digital medium format camera and instruction in landscape photography from two UK photographers Steve Gosling and Peter Cox. I then decided to add a second workshop offered by another landscape photographer, Bruce Percy, in the Northeast region of the Highlands. The circles on the map of Scotland at the right show the portions of the Highlands that I visited on this trip.

For me the most striking characteristics of the Highlands were the bog (hard to walk across and ubiquitous) and the striking orange-brown color of the foliage. The photograph of Loch Loyne at the top of this blog provides a good example of the fall color of the Highlands. What I found most striking was the intensity of the orange hue in the color.

I enjoyed the trip and the weather wasn’t an issue. In face, I’m told that the weather during my visit was exceptional for this time of year. A couple of mornings we woke up to temperatures around freezing, and we only had a couple of days with some rain, but for the most part we enjoyed reasonable temperatures and partly cloudy skies. The landscape of rolling hills and the abundance of small lakes made for interesting photography. It was fun using the Phase One medium format camera; it’s resolution and picture quality is phenomenal. However, it is a very expensive system (the camera that I used in the workshop had a retail value of $40,000) and, for me, limited in utility to formal landscape photography and not the handheld style of photography in which I normally engage. So, while I’d love to have one to use, I don’t think Santa will be bringing one this year.

It was a fruitful trip. I learned a lot about landscape photography and came back with some good pictures and great memories. Click Here to see pictures from this trip. Enjoy.

The end of May I made a return trip to Moscow ID to visit my brother Gary and his wife Jeannie. I told my sister Elaine that I was going to

see brother Gary; it has been awhile since she had seen Gary, so she and her husband Ray decided to drive over from Portland OR to join us for a few days of craziness.

On my previous visit to Moscow last September I was inspired by the old abandoned trucks and buildings, along with the vast rolling fields of this part of Idaho and Washington. In fact, the area is so unique that folks here simply call it "The Palouse". So, the "sibling reunion" took the form of a photo tour of The Palouse - early rise for the good morning light; long afternoons searching for the perfect shot during the golden light of the afternoon, and exploration during the rest of the day. We did, however, find time for cherry pie and our last night together was a classic "goodies" and movies night.

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Recently I participated in a day outing to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. The outing was led by a Ernie and Kati Cowan. Ernie is a nature photographer that has been exploring, photographing and leading tours in and around Anza-Borrego his entire life. I had hoped to have the opportunity to explore and photograph wildflowers. As it turns out, this has been a very dry year in the desert and flowers where very rare; the day turned out to be more about the rocks and scenery of Anza-Borrego. Read More...

In early December I attended a landscape photography workshop in Joshua Tree National Park. The workshop was led by Alain Briot, a landscape photography with a lot of experience photographing the Southwest landscape. Read More...

I just returned from a short trip to visit relatives in Fort Collins, CO. While I was there Corkie and Maxine took me for a ride up Poudre Canyon, through Walden and back down to Fort Collins. I also took a day to drive up to Estes Park and to hike around Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. Read More...

It’s hard to believe that with all my foreign and domestic travel I had so far missed the splendor of Yellowstone. So, when I retired I planned two photography trips to celebrate my new freedom: Tanzania and Yellowstone. After doing some research on Yellowstone I determined that the best time for my visit would be September -- A plan was born.
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I spent the last few days in Moscow Idaho visiting with my brother Gary and his wife Jeannie. This was my first trip to this part of the Northwest. Jeannie and Gary also enjoy photography and we had fun seeking out interesting scenery while touring Coeur D'Aline, Palouse, and the area around Moscow. Read More...