For the second year in a row, there are fairly large numbers of snowy owls that are wintering nearby. Near Seattle, snow geese are a regular winter feature, but snowy owls are a rare treat. Reckless photographers, though, are in danger of driving our infrequent visitors well back north — or even worse.
One factor that can have a significant impact on the quality of your images is how sharp they are. Sometimes I like being able to stand up close to a large print and enjoy the clear definition around the smallest details. Sharpness helps the images look more lifelike.
While there's also something to be said for the art of blurring away the fine details, producing sharp images is something that most nature photographers want to accomplish, at least some of the time. The quality of your equipment plays a big role in how sharp your images are, but so does your technique.
Here are some tips for getting the sharpest images out of the equipment you already own:
The full moon may provide an excuse for all sorts of crazy activities, but it can also provide an extra special element to landscape photographs. Here are some tips for capturing the moon as a part of a landscape image.
Every so often, there's a comet that's so bright it can light up the night sky. But a couple times a year, comets that have long since passed by, or maybe even disintegrated entirely, can light up the night sky, too.
The phenomenon is called the Zodiacal Light and it's the result of a giant cloud of comet dust that stretches from Mercury to Jupiter. It's about as bright as the Milky Way and it's visible with the naked eye about two hours before sunrise in the fall; two hours after sunset in the spring.
Blue skies are fine for travel brochures, but my favorite landscape images have an element of drama. And they're captured at what I call the edge of a storm.
While walking along the shore of Mono Lake in California, I saw an osprey fly overhead with a giant stick firmly locked in its talons. Not only was I surprised to see an osprey there, I was stunned it would even nest in the area.
The scientific name for osprey translates to "fish eagle." Mono Lake, however, is so salty that only brine shrimp live in its waters.
Someone who knows I'm a nature photographer, but isn't one himself, recently asked me what I do on cloudy days.
"On a day like today," he said, gesturing out a window toward the gray sky, "what would you photograph? Anything?"
I've seen plenty of waterfalls, but until recently, I had never seen a "waterfall of murres." That's how friends of mine in Cannon Beach, Oregon, describe a truly wondrous nature show that takes place this time of year on the nearby Chapman Point.
There hasn't been a waterfall per se at Dry Falls in central Washington for at least 10,000 years. But when there was a falls there, it would have been spectacular: 400 feet high, 3½ miles wide and ten times as powerful as all the world's current rivers combined.
We are creatures of habit. That's well documented. In stores, we buy a particular brand simply because that's the brand we always buy. Many of us regularly check our messages whether or not we're expecting anything because we've gotten into that habit.
And as photographers, we're inclined to photograph a familiar subject a particular way simply because that's the way we've always done it. It becomes habit and we probably don't even think about why we're setting up the shot that way.
The black-capped chickadee is no ivory-billed woodpecker. Dozens visit my office window every day to feast on the free suet.
But just because they're common, doesn't mean they are not interesting. And a recent snow storm that, at times, had my yard buried under nearly 10 inches of snow allowed me to create some images that help tell their remarkable winter story.
For each of the past few years, I have compiled a small gallery of my favorite images from the year. It was something I did when I first started out in photography; Jim Goldstein, whose blog collects the best-of collections from more than a hundred other photographers, inspired me to restart the tradition.
I think the exercise of reviewing and editing your work is quite helpful in refining your art and identifying opportunities for improvement. For me, one of the things that was immediately evident in past years was that I often relied on travel to exotic locations to fuel my creativity. In 2011, I worked hard to bring the level of excitement and passion that I feel in a new place back to the familiar scenery at home.
