Behind the scenes: Solar eclipse in Spain

The eclipse lasted about 90 seconds. The experience of photographing it lasted far longer.

I can say with confidence that if you’ve seen one eclipse, you have not seen them all.

We don’t always need the full picture

When I first started taking photos, I wanted to fit the entire world into the tiny viewfinder. Every picture was about everything in front of me. There wasn’t one specific thing that caught my attention. Everything did.

I didn’t start as a nature photographer. I started as a tourist. One of the first pictures I took was of the United States Capitol Building. I was in Washington, D.C., for a journalism conference, and I decided to venture out to see the city at night. I started at the Capitol, was struck at how it seemed to glow, and decided to take a picture.

Watch your step

If you’re in the mood to explore, you might say that you’re "going to look around." And often we do that literally, scanning our environment from side to side, seldom deviating from eye level. But there’s so much more to see. Sometimes the world truly is at your feet.

When you’re walking dogs in a suburban neighborhood, you might not expect there’s much in the way of nature to appreciate. And that may be true if your view is limited to things that are five to six feet above the ground.

What do you see here?

At an exhibit of my work, a man approached, excitedly, about something he had discovered in one of the pictures.

“I see a horse,” he said. I have photographed horses, but this was not one of those images. It was of a waterfall plunging a thousand feet down a sheer cliff — a drop so steep even mountain goats couldn’t traverse it.

A window seat on life

It’s been a while since I’ve been on a flight where the pilot encouraged us to look out the window. When it happens, it’s a rare event. It usually requires passing over something with the magnitude of the Grand Canyon. I never once heard the captain suggest looking out at the rugged landscape of Greenland or a spectacular view of the northern lights, even though it’s not like any of us passengers have anything better to do.

The nature of change

The basalt columns on Reynisfjara beach in southern Iceland have stood there for at least a few thousand years. A black sand beach has put the towering hexagons within easy reach for as long as anyone can remember. But in a flash, or rather a winter storm, the columns, a product of an ancient volcanic eruption, are now out at sea, the beach cleared away.

Some wonders need time to be revealed

Some of our most spectacular national parks are the result of exploration. Once they’ve become a dot on a map, however, we stop looking further even though there’s so much more we could discover.

Seeing slowly is not wasted time

The teenage philosopher Ferris Bueller once said: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” In the nearly 40 years that have passed since Ferris took a day off to appreciate the fleeting innocence of high school, life has only moved faster. And we look around less.

The great irony is that we’re supposed to have more free time than ever. Each technological advance promises to make our lives easier and give us the freedom to enjoy life. But we don’t gain freedom. We’re expected to be even more productive.

The storm between the calm

In art, religious works glorify the Creator. Portraits convey personality and status. Still lifes showcase technique. But landscapes, up until relatively recently, were, well, just landscapes.

We now know landscapes can be just as expressive as any other form of art. That doesn’t mean that every picture of the environment is a creative masterpiece. Over the course of a year, a million people may take turns taking a quick picture of Half Dome at Yosemite’s famous Tunnel Overlook. Is every one of them a work of art? Probably not. But then not every snapshot selfie holding a wheel of cheese at a farmers’ market is a deep exploration of what it means to be alive.

Autumn on the world's largest sponge

It was the squishiest place I had ever hiked. As I took a step, I felt the ground compress slightly, accompanied by a sound that was part hiss and gurgle. As I stepped again, the ground where I had been snapped back into place.

Walking on the lowland tundra of Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska is like walking on the world’s largest wet sponge. It’s a place where even when you can’t see water you can feel its impact.

You had to be there

As I watched a brown bear dive into the water of the Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska, creating a splash so big it obscured most of its 1,000-pound body, I briefly acknowledged that I was lucky to witness what most wildlife photographers come here to see.

It is an experience to behold. There’s silence as the bear works to identify a salmon it hopes to catch, then a sudden burst of activity as it launches after it. The splashes grow larger and louder. The bear soon disappears behind a curtain of water, its sharp claws the last to vanish. There’s now a moment of suspense. We must wait a few seconds for the water to settle to see if the bear caught its fish.

But there is so much more to the bears. These moments of drama made up but a few minutes of my week with them, yet these displays of raw power are typically what we think of when we think of them.

Snapshots and souvenirs

Today is World Photography Day — a day to appreciate “the art of capturing moments.” For me, photography was the gateway to appreciating the moments themselves.

The truth is beneath the surface (and also above it)

Between editing software and artificial intelligence, photographs are no longer trusted as presenting an absolute truth. It’s a different world from the one nearly 150 years ago when Eadweard Muybridge showed racehorses can briefly fly through the air. But even an unedited photo represents only one version of the truth. That’s because there is no such thing as a completely unedited photo.

Invasive inspiration

Fibrous strands of red swayed just below the water's surface with the motion of the incoming tide. I loved the color. I loved the lines. I loved the serenity. As I stood up to my knees in the saltwater of Puget Sound, I was struck by the beauty before me.

But none of it was supposed to be there.

Getting beyond "the shot"

You will sometimes hear photographers talk about getting “the shot” — they captured what they wanted to get. If you were to compare photography to the way we commonly think about education, this picture is the equivalent of the diploma. It’s the reward. The achievement is complete. We’re done here.

This concept has some precedence in art history. Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer of candid scenes and he was known for capturing “the decisive moment.” The elements in his photographs were so perfectly arranged that a picture taken even a split second earlier or later would appear obviously inferior.

No such thing as small actions

There’s a saying about how Earth becomes smaller every passing year. There is an element of literal truth to that. Each day, several hundred tons of hydrogen, helium, and oxygen leak out of our atmosphere, more than offsetting the 40-some tons of asteroid debris and other space dust that enters. But the saying is really about how technology makes our world feel smaller.

With the internet, information travels across the planet at light speed. Commercial jetliners allow us to get virtually anywhere in under a day. But as the world feels smaller, we may feel smaller still. While the shrinking world puts more within reach, our influence seems to be shrinking, too. There are plenty of factors that make us feel personally insignificant.

Whispers and shouts

In photography, we typically celebrate the dramatic. Landscapes with explosive colors. Powerful wildlife in the midst of intense action. But that’s not usually how I see the world.

Most of the time I’m in nature I’m thinking. About the meaning of life. About how everything is connected to everything else. How all of us — human, plant, or animal — are just trying to get by.

What's the purpose?

If, right this moment, I could be anywhere in the world, I might choose to be in a national park in an exotic country. But I’m at home, in front of my computer. And I just got back from taking a walk in my neighborhood.

My route is largely the same every time I do it, and I try to walk it at least every other day. Someone I regularly see on these walks asked me once why I don’t choose a different path. “I would be so bored,” she said.

Getting under the surface in the Cook Islands

Photography is one of the tools I use to satisfy my curiosity about the natural world. But while 99 percent of my photos are taken from land, more than 70 percent of Earth’s surface is covered by water. Life is short and nobody can see everything, of course, but my choice of subjects had significantly limited my worldview.

It’s a discrepancy that I’ve been trying to resolve off and on over the past decade or so. Just over a year ago, I made my greatest effort yet to explore the world beneath the waves as I explored the lagoons surrounding three of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific.

Finding meaning in the darkness

My goal with any time in nature — as it is with my photography — is to get closer to the world around me. To make connections. To see something I never noticed before.

Here in the northern hemisphere, we’re now in the midst of our longest nights of the year. While some bemoan perpetual darkness — where I am nearly two-thirds of the day is night — I’m finding myself staying out late more often.