It was a beautiful summer day, and I was taking our normal hike to the river with our dogs Jasper and Eddy. I was also experimenting with shooting slow motion video, which I haven’t done much of, hoping I’d get some fun shots of running dogs. Eddy, still just five months old, was doing the bulk of swimming and ball …
Alaska has always been on my bucket list of places to go — what better location for someone who loves being in the outdoors? But there was always somewhere a little closer, or a little less expensive to travel to. Or when time and budget weren’t major factors, then Alaska wasn’t that far away after all — we could get there some …
A trailer for my latest video project on Alaska. Follow me on Facebook for more updates!
Thursday Morning in Old Sacramento The Background My latest video project started out as a way to take advantage of an opportunity. Over the past few months I’ve had to travel to downtown Sacramento, CA every two weeks. Not knowing the city very well, I started arriving early to explore a bit, and found myself spending a lot of time …
A travel essay I wrote a few years ago about a trip to Baja California in Mexico. In Bahia de los Angeles, on the gulf coast of Baja California, there are no signs to warn you about the stingrays. In the United States, a ubiquity of signs alert one to the variety of dangers faced in daily life: deer crossing the …
There’s a saying in the mountains: If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes – it’ll change. As photographers, we often need to wait for a photograph to come together; sometimes it only takes a few seconds, sometimes a few days. But whether we’re waiting for a storm to pass, a moment to happen, or light to break over …
Three friends travel to Costa Rica, and discover more than just a buggy jungle. My wife Carol and our dear friend Dakota traveled to Costa Rica in search of lush jungles, outlandish wildlife, and adventure. This is a video postcard from our journey. More on Costa Rica Read more about our travels in Costa Rica and the photographic (and personal) challenges I navigated during the …
I recently rented a Panasonic GH4 and shot some test footage to see if I wanted to add it to my arsenal as both a video camera and a lightweight stills camera. The short answer is Yes! with a couple of caveats (below the video). All the footage was shot using the Cinelike D profile, with saturation and contrast set to -5. …
Stanley Lambchop was smashed flat in the night by a bulletin board that fell on him while he slept. But the newly-minted Flat Stanley takes advantage of his new shape, and goes on to have many adventures. That’s the premise of the book Flat Stanley: His Original Adventure!, and the basis of countless second grade class projects intended to help …
Part 4 of a 4-part travelogue from Costa Rica The problem wasn’t so much that Dakota had capsized his kayak in a river filled with 10’ crocodiles, or even that he was now soaking wet with hours yet to paddle; it was that he had lost his binoculars. A 30-second vignette of Boca Tapada, Costa Rica (with some footage from …
Part 3 of a 4-part travelogue from Costa Rica “Five hanging bridges . . . 2.25 miles of gorgeous trails . . . cloudy and calm . . . 1:00pm . . . yeah, we were going to run out of time.” — from Carol’s journal. A 34-second vignette of Arenal, Costa Rica The map said the Sendero Las Cateratas (Trail of …
Part 2 of a 4-part travelogue from Costa Rica The first thing we noticed was the wind. A cold, howling, grab-a-fencepost-so-you-don’t-fall-over kind of wind. My first photography hero, Galen Rowell, wrote in his book Mountain Light: “A flower photographer’s hell is a place of tremendous beauty . . . in continuously perfect light where a gentle breeze blows eternally, making …
“Oh, Sweetie, why don’t you just sleep in for once?” “I can’t. We’re only here for a couple days before we move on, and I’ve got to photograph as much as I can – who knows if and when we’ll ever make it back here?” “But you’re going to burn yourself out.” “No, there’s too much to see and do …
A few of my favorites from a pinup-style photo shoot with Sydnie. She had her dress made, and brought her husband’s 1946 Dodge to the Bayley House Barn in Pilot Hill, California.
So there we were, slowly making our way up the switchbacks towards the ridge overlooking Silver Lake in the Sierra Nevada. All in a line: human, dog, dog, human. Tramp, tramp, tramp. Little puffs of dust with each step. Gee, I thought, the poor dogs are right there at foot-level, eating all the dust. I wonder what hiking is like …
My friend Alex was asking me the other day about how well the Nikon D7000 performed in low light when recording video. But rather than try to describe the noise levels at high ISOs, I decided to put together a short video that showed the differences. This post is a bit of a departure from my normal fare, but I thought …
My latest video project is a quick montage of video clips and photos I shot while on a camping trip in the Sierra Nevada mountains with my good buddy Dakota and dog Jasper. As is often the case in the Sierra Nevada in late summer, we were hammered by a series of thunderstorms that kept us reading in our tents and playing chess in the truck. While I only had one clear sunset over the course of a few days, there was usually some time during the day we could get out and about, and we tried to make the most of it.
While it’s easy to think about putting your camera away when a storm rolls in, that’s often the best time to capture dramatic light, and potentially make dramatic photos.
A behind-the-scenes look at the making of my recent video project, Kauai: Embracing the Journey. My goals for the video, how I had to change mid-stream, and some behind-the-scenes videos.
The greatest rewards in travel often come when expectations clash with reality. Such was the case when my wife and I travelled to Kauai, Hawaii this year. After spending hours online and buried in guide books researching all the things to do, places to see, and adventures to have, we arrived in the middle of a series of tremendous thunderstorms …