Spring in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is hard to describe unless you’ve been there. It feels like a real spring. Things are coming alive. Flowers are blooming and covering acres of the forest floor. The waterfalls are flowing. The bears are on the move. And the green — the amazing green that the
The winter of 2015-2016 felt like a bit of a let down compared to other years. While, the average temps haven’t been released, yet, they were above normal. The winter was punctuated by rain and temperatures above freezing. It even reached into the 60s at points. This wasn’t a normal winter — but what is
Adding a human figure to a night image helps ground the image to the earth. A silhouetted figure is heavy with visual weight and attracts your audience’s eyes. You can use that to help develop flow in your image by positioning the figure where you need the audience’s eyes to go. When you add a
I’ve already posted a retrospective of my travels from 2015 (see: Photos from the Road), so now it’s time to pick out my favorite photos from the year. That last three years, I’ve done this via eBooks (and I may turn this into an eBook as well). But, this year I decided to send out my
The second to last photography workshop of the year this year was in the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. I lead a group of photographers from mainly the Midwest, but also the east coast on a three-day adventure in the Badlands. I wasn’t going to run this winter one next year and in its place
Looking back on 2015, I’ve discovered that I did some of my best photography while traveling. While I have one more trip to the Badlands National Park (this weekend), I thought it would be interesting to look back at the photos that I took while on the road this year. This collection of images includes
Last year, I did two calendars. I offered my landscape calendar (buy my 2016 Northern Landscapes Calendar here), and due to popular request I offered a nightscape calendar. While not as popular as the landscape calendar, I thought it did well enough to offer it again in 2016. Just like last year’s calendar, this one
Creating calendars out of my own images always surprises me. Each year takes on a different feel. In 2012, the calendar felt abstract. In 2013, it felt ethereal. In 2014, it felt stark with in-your-face beauty. For 2015, the calendar felt happy. And 2016 feel unassuming. The pictures are fun, beautiful but most importantly they feel
You’ve come back from vacation with several memory cards full of photos, and it’s time to download several 1000 photos to your hard drive and try to decide which ones to delete and which photos to keep. The chore of deleting the bad ones feels hard, because you have an immediate emotional connection to all
Outdoor ethics and outdoor etiquette seem to receive only cursory treatment within the outdoor photography world, and it’s time to change that. The problem is as more people have discovered the joys of nature photography, the cursory treatment of ethics is failing to reach the people it needs to reach. As a result, more and more violations
