As the leaves along the Cedar River in Washington state turn from green to yellow, gold, orange, and red, people walking along the river's banks may not notice there's an equally colorful display just under the water's surface. As the leaves change color, so, too, do the sockeye salmon returning to the river after spending the past couple years at sea.
As I was packing up my camera after photographing from the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, two men came up and asked if they could see what I was shooting. I said, "yes," and pressed the play button on my camera to display the last image I took that morning.
Without asking, one of the men rotated the jog dial on the back of my camera to see the other images I captured that morning. But he rotated it clockwise, and instead of seeing an earlier image, the camera displayed the first image on the memory card — one I took four days earlier.
"Wow!" he exclaimed. "Is that Niagara Falls?"
The Wilderness Act, which has preserved some of the most pristine areas of the United States, turns 50 next week. My absolute passion for nature photography has just turned 14.
The two are more related than they might seem.
Protection Island is a small island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca whose name now has a double meaning.
Located at the mouth of Discovery Bay, the name originally referred to the island’s usefulness to humans. The island nearly stretches across the entrance to the bay, shielding it from some of the strait’s choppy waters.
The island still offers that protection, but now it protects a whole host of wildlife as well.
My style of photography has always been to capture a "living wilderness." I believe the Earth is as alive as we are. And that means it is dynamic — always changing.
Because our lifespans are so short, it's hard to fathom a time when Mount Rainier wasn't there, when the Hawaiian islands were tiny buds on the bottom of the ocean, when the Grand Canyon was filled. But there are plenty of changes that we can witness.
Think of penguins and you typically think of long lines of the flightless birds gathering on ice. New Zealand, however, is home to several types of penguins that march across bright scenery reminiscent of central California beaches, even if the temperature is closer to the Antarctic.
One of these types is the incredibly rare yellow-eyed penguin — one of the rarest penguins in the world. Considered by some scientists to be the oldest species of penguin in existence today, there are only about 4,000 left. And they’re all in New Zealand, where the natives call them Hoiho.
If you would have asked me a decade ago about how a bird knows how to fly, I would have regurgitated the answer I was taught in school: They are hatched knowing how. But after intensely studying a bald eagle nest for three years, I not only believe the young eaglets learn to fly, but that their parents also learn to be better parents.
I realize it was only a couple months ago that I wrote about photographing frozen waterfalls without actually showing the waterfall in the image. Shortly after I posted that, Washington state was hit with another week-long deep freeze, and I got the opportunity to create images like that again.
From November into March, the fields on Fir Island in the Skagit Valley of Washington state are often white, but it's not the result of snow. It's the result of snow geese.
About 80,000 snow geese winter in Western Washington. The vast majority of them winter in the Skagit Valley.
In terms of the images I produced, 2013 was an unusual year for me. Over the course of most years, I shoot a wide variety of nature images. But 2013, like the title of the book I just completed, was for me the Year of the Eagle. Easily two-thirds of my images were about bald eagles as I worked hard to fill gaps in the story I wanted to tell.
But the year wasn't just about bald eagles. I made my third trip to Iceland. While there, I photographed the inside of an old volcano's magma chamber, the only known one in the world people can climb inside. I also got to capture an incredible northern lights display perfectly reflecting in a lake that is normally quite choppy. I also worked hard to capture beauty close to home.
In the end, I think my annual best-of collection is still quite varied. Here are a few of my favorite images of 2013:
There are about 1,500 volcanoes on land — and even more underwater — but only one that you can truly climb inside.
