Balsamroot is a member of the sunflower family, so it seemed only appropriate to photograph a hillside of the golden flowers in the first light of day. I also wanted to photograph the wildflowers in a way that illustrated how they can absolutely dominate the landscape for a couple of weeks in the early spring.
Tuesday, April 30, 2019
Monday, April 8, 2019
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Thursday, February 28, 2019
The “new” thing for better photography
Photographers are conditioned to always need something new.
Often it’s equipment. We’re bombarded with ads for new cameras and lenses that somehow will immediately make our art better.
For nature and wildlife photographers, it’s also locations. There’s always some hot new location that promises incredible opportunities that are like none we’ve ever seen before.
But there’s one new thing that will make an even bigger difference in your photography. It’s attitude.
Thursday, January 31, 2019
Remembering the monarchs
It was the spring of 1980 and one of our final kindergarten projects involved watching a pair of caterpillars transform into monarch butterflies. For weeks, we watched them feed on milkweed leaves and then disappear into their chrysalises. When they finally emerged as butterflies, we took them outside to the playground and set them free.
That experience in the classroom near Seattle, Washington, was one of my favorites in school and helped give me an even greater appreciation for nature. It took nearly 25 years, but I finally got a chance to photograph monarchs in their wintering grounds in Pacific Grove, California — butterflies that were perhaps 100 generations removed from the ones we helped raise.
That winter in California, I found clusters of monarchs so dense they somewhat resembled leaves. Since then, the numbers of butterflies have plummeted, each year reaching a new record low.
Monday, December 31, 2018
Best of 2018
Welcome to the annual post of my favorite images from the past year. And let’s just get this out of the way right now: eagle, fox, rabbit.
The image of the bald eagle that stole a rabbit from a young fox quickly became a defining picture not just of my year, but of my career. Just hours after I posted the story and a sequence of images on my blog this spring, TV stations and newspapers were emailing me, wanting to do a story on it. By the end of the week, it had run in papers from Russia to Australia, on network TV news and was a featured story on National Geographic. And now, CNN named it one of the pictures of the year.
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Behind the scenes: Bioluminescence, Mosquito Bay, Vieques
Whether you call it Mosquito Bay, Bahía Bioluminiscente or something else, the bioluminescent bay on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques is the world’s brightest. The Guinness Book of World Records says so.
The glow comes from dinoflagellates, which are not particularly rare. They’re a type of plankton and are found in most ocean water. What makes Mosquito Bay special, however, is how concentrated they are there.