Look at a sky watcher’s chart and you will see sunset listed as a precise moment of time. I, however, prefer to think of it as an event — an event that can last hours.
There’s more to a sunset than the instant when the sun slips below the horizon. Sometimes an hour before, the western sky can begin to turn golden. Puffy cumulus clouds that are low in the sky can go from being pure white to intense yellow.
I hesitate to call these my best images of the year. My preferences change over time. I also try to produce work that’s more emotional than documentary and it feels wrong for different emotions to have compete with each other. But these 15 images do a marvelous job of summing up my year.
I’m always a little amazed at how bright it is at night — not just in cities, but even out in the wilderness. Even on a moonless night, even out in the middle of nowhere, it’s not completely black.
In the darkest skies, you can probably see about 2,000 stars. They produce enough starlight for me to be able to walk around. But recently on the Washington coast there was a second source of natural light and it came from the ground.
The American West is home to about a dozen majestic volcanoes. Most of the time we appreciate their towering summits. But what’s underground can be every bit as spectacular.
The volcanoes don’t erupt that often. Only one — Mount St. Helens — has erupted during my lifetime. But occasionally they erupt in such a way that produces dramatic caves, called lava tubes. One of my projects this year was to explore more of them.
It has been said that every picture has already been taken. More than a billion pictures are taken each day. And some are largely recreations of images that someone else has taken before.
With such a glut of photography is there anything left to do? It’s a question that was in the back of my mind this past month — a month I mostly spent photographing fall color, something I’ve done every October for more than 20 years now.
About 100 million images will be posted on Instagram today, so it may not seem like one image can make a difference. But last week 100 images did.
What turns a bird picture into a work of art? A magazine recently asked me and other photographers who had been honored by Audubon that question. I’m certain we gave them enough material to fill a how-to book. But they were looking only for a short article, so little of it ended up in print. Here’s what would have gone into my chapter.
