I’ve been creating fine art and conceptual illustration for many years. My work has appeared on award-winning novels ranging from mysteries and science fiction, to books based on the X-Files TV series, to Newbery Award-winning books for children.

I also create portraits of people and wildlife, translating what I feel and what my mind sees into a physical image, its meaning malleable.

Lately I’ve concentrated on a body of work centering on ordinary backyard wildlife. These photographs capture the unique qualities of light interacting with the natural world, including luminous photographs of honey bees and small birds in flight, glowing fireflies mating and hovering over twilight fields, mosquitoes with a belly full of blood, and new-born praying mantis nymphs emerging from their egg cases.

Story behind this image: The ongoing adventures of a honey bee, her unpredictable twists a mutiny against the sky. Thanks for all the bees: honey bees, bumblebees, solitary bees. Like treasure hidden in plain sight, dancing in the scattered sunlight, miraculous pollen-seekers with energy enough to exhaust the average hunter-gatherer, and exhilarate the patient, watchful observer.

How would you describe your style?

I’m primarily concerned with portraying light and emotion, experimenting as much as possible, and finding the image through chance and discovery.

Story behind this image: Using only existing light to illuminate these bees can be very difficult, especially when they’re in flight, but so much of what the bee does and is IS flight. Here I was able to use the sun to light up and capture the detail in this worker’s wings. It also highlights, in another sense, how harmonious the natural world is, how one process creates life for everything it touches. In the sense that photography is light, the sun is the world, and the bees know that.

What’s your approach to post processing?

No more than is needed, but enough to express my feelings for the image. In some cases I discover more than I expected in an image through post processing.

Story behind this image: A sharp little angel of the garden, a honey bee on her way to the wild side, too chic for her own good! She casts shadows throughout the spring air, mixing bravura style and performance in the greatest American road trip. Her natural elegance flashes fire from an understated Gilded Age.

What or who inspires you?

I’m inspired by the challenge of capturing light, and anyone who has surprised me or shown me something new. Artists I’ve learned from include Francisco Goya, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, George Inness, Arthur Rackham, Max Ernst, Winsor McCay, Charles Burchfield, Francis Bacon, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec and Giorgio De Chirico.

What gear do you use?

Canon 5D MII and several lenses. Much of my equipment I make myself, especially camera supports, since I often work in confined, ground-level spaces.

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Links

Website: http://www.beedreams.com/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/bugdreams

The power and beauty of an exceptional sunrise or sunset is incredible. As nature photographers, it is understandable that we gravitate towards the most direct expressions of these incredible moments. Those sunrises and sunsets often offer not only incredible color in the skies, but also on the landscape itself–color that shows texture and contrast by raking across our subjects. Trying to pull in the whole picture, capturing all of this, is a wonderful goal.

Sadly, all too often, the skies don’t light up the way we expect. Or other factors get in the way of these hopes. In remaining attached to our vision of the grand scene, it is all too easy to give up and to forget what powerful alternatives can remain. Often, I find those alternatives include reflections.

This first image from Mono Lake is typical. The Old Marina area sits at the west end of the lake near the base of the Sierra Nevada. The land is more open to the east, leaving open excellent (but oft-unfulfilled) promises for blazing sunrises. This particular morning the air was clear but no clouds were around to help create that grand scene. So, I started thinking about capturing the warm light that would soon wash across the Sierra Nevada, but that left me photographing across Highway 395, which separates the lake from the mountains. By focusing on reflections in the lake I was able to find compositions that omitted the unsightly highway but captured the warm orange sunrise glow.

A nearly cloudless sunset near the end of my Oregon Coast photo workshop last year provides another example. That evening, a lack of clouds to the west left the sunset sky orange but without detail. While the mouth of Sunset Bay provided some reasonable opportunities for silhouettes against the plain orange background, the lack of detail in the orange failed to truly capture my imagination. I recalled some interesting water patterns along the beach edge I’d noticed earlier in the day, realized that those could provide interesting forms and detail, scampered back to that section of beach and shot the Sunset Bay image here. That image turned out to be one of my favorites from the entire Oregon trip.

Working through these hurdles is simple. Take a deep breath, and accept that the Big Sunset isn’t going to happen, and look for what light, color and interest is available. Focus on what good stuff you have to work with. If you’ve got color but there are no clouds to create texture or form, then your job is to find a composition that introduces texture and form to that color, often (but not necessarily) with water reflections.

If there is great color and texture but it is in a very limited part of the sky, look for compositions that mix a lot of foreground interest with a little bit of that sky. Work to maximize the amount of your image that shows the sweet light and to leave out as much of what’s not working as possible. Water reflections can lend a hand here too, sometimes–in compositions that include both the small area of interest in sunset clouds but that also manage to pick up their reflections.

So, don’t despair, a weak sunset can often make for great photographic opportunities–if you stop, let go of your preconceptions, and begin to see anew.

(Part one of this “introduction” can be found here.)

Heading North from Redwood National Park, Highway 101 passes through the town of Klamath and continues towards Del Norte Redwoods State Park. Del Norte primarily serves campers, but the challenging Damnation Creek Trail provides a beautiful 2.5 hike to a small beach cove.

Continuing north past Del Norte Redwoods you descend towards Crescent City, California, at the south end of town (and you’ll want a map or directions) you can head east and connect with Howland Hill Road which will take you to Jedediah Smith State Park. Because Jed Smith isn’t right on Highway 101, and because Howland Hill is unpaved, this area receives less traffic than the Redwood NP/Prairie Creek Redwoods SP area to the South, making for a more relaxing and meditative photographic experience, particularly in spring or fall.

Howland Hill Road is the primary scenic route through Jed Smith. This fairly well-maintained dirt road (passenger vehicles present no trouble here) twists and turns for 4-5 miles through the park, crossing and paralleling Mill Creek for a time, and eventually connecting with Highway 199 near the small hamlet of Hiouchi. Off of Highway 199 you’ll find additional trails in and near the Reed-Simpson grove worth exploring, but I’m going to focus here on that main section of Howland Hill.

The headline destination along Howland Hill road is Smith’s famous Stout Grove. A simple, one-mile loop trail takes you through enormous first-growth redwoods, a natural cathedral carpeted with emerald ferns, and connects up with trails that parallel the Smith River. Because there are hills to either side of the grove it’s not hard to find compositions here that don’t show any sky.

While Stout is the “big name” destination of Jedediah Smith, when I think of the park, I think of the grove as only one part of the entire length of Howland Hill. I rarely manage to travel more than a hundred yards along the road without seeing something — a group of trees, rhododendrons, fall color, a trillium bloom, a river scene, a mushroom, something that I want to photograph. I’ll be there again in a few days, and I’m already buzzing with anticipation.

Seasons and Logistics

My favorite seasons for the park are spring and late fall. Summer brings crowds and often (at least inland) more sun, spring brings flowers (lupines earlier, rhododendrons later), and the first winter storms can bring cloud cover and color-popping wetness to the ferns and logs. In late October and early November you may also encounter some fall color (primarily paler yellow ground covers and bushes).

Crescent City is the only town of any size near any of the parks at over (7500 residents) and it makes a great base of operations for Del Norte and Jed Smith, but is a little too far North (perhaps an hour) to really be practical for doing a lot of photography in Redwood National Park. The small town of Klamath just north of Redwood National Park has fairly limited services in general, I based my last redwoods coast photographic workshop out of the Ravenwood Motel there (inexpensive, comfortable– but not large–rooms). For a trip where I didn’t want to change between motels I’d likely stay in Klamath, if I were willing to move my base of operations once during a trip I’d probably work out of Klamath and Crescent City.

Even with two parts, this introduction has barely scratched the surface of an incredibly rich area, and one well-worth spending time in and photographing.

(PS: You may want to consider a quick trip to “get there while you can.” While this is far from certain, in the wake of California’s current budget crisis at least one current California budget proposal calls for the closure of all three state parks I’ve talked about, but the changes wouldn’t effect Redwood NP.)

The coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) of California’s north coast include the tallest trees on Earth, with several examples of individual trees over 370 feet tall and provide amazing photographic and sometimes challenging photographic opportunities. This weekend I’ll be travelling to the California’s north coast (roughly betwen the towns of Trinidad, California and Crescent City, California)  to visit the constellation of four parks (Redwood National Park, Prarie Creek Redwoods State Park, Del Norte State Park, and Jedediah Smith State Park) that to my mind represent some of the finest redwoods photography opportunities available. In this article, I hope to give you a taste of those incredible areas and add a few words about the opportunities and challenges they present.

Starting from the south, Redwood National Park is the most natural place to begin our virtual tour, the National Park Service maintains a visitor center there (actually just south of Orick, CA) and in Crescent City which can provide excellent information and maps of both this park and the three state parks as well. A trip along the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway (which runs through Redwood NP and Prairie Creek SP) makes an excellent first introduction to the redwood environment, as the road wanders through enormous columns of tree creating a vast virtual room, carpeted with fern and trillium. The strangely-named Cal-Barrel Road (a quick turn off the parkway) offers an excellent introductory location to start your explorations.

Here you will quickly discover three challenges in photographing redwood groves: scale, contrast, and the incredible sensitivity of ferns to even the slightest breeze. With respect to the contrast and wind your best bet will be to work on a cloudy (or foggy) windless morning. Contrast is a particular problem on sunny days, as the few bits of sunlight that get through into redwood groves are often many, many stops brighter than that most of the scene.

At Davidson Road near the south end of the park you’ll find the Roosevelt Elk Grove which (as the name suggests) often provides opportunities to (carefully!) photograph elk. From that first grove also consider the short walk to Trillium Falls which is a small, but elegant, waterfall which can be particularly beautiful near the very end of autumn (late October or early November). Davidson Road continues as an often-rutted dirt road out to Gold Bluffs Beach and runs along that beach for a few miles to the parking area for Fern Canyon. The bluffs warm nicely in sunset light (on the rare occasion the coast doesn’t fog in) and elk are often found along the road here, often much closer than you’ll find them over at the Elk Grove. The road ends at a parking area for a short, mile-long hike into Fern Canyon, where a small stream has carved a steep narrow canyon, 20′-30′ high in places, the canyon walls lined with fern. Expect to get your shoes wet here. Bring boots or Tevas, depending on the weather, as you’ll be making several stream crossings along the way.

At the north end of the Redwood NP, just south of the town of Klamath, don’t miss the opportunity to explore the park’s Coastal Drive, which follows the top of the ocean bluffs. While the steepness of the cliffs makes it difficult in most locations to get a wide scenic view here, there are often excellent detail opportunities, and the Face Rock Overlook just off the drive provides a stunning view south along the coast, again offering (weather permitting) excellent sunset potential.

While you could easily spend weeks exploring Redwood National Park and Prairie Creek just in the areas I’ve mentioned (and there’s more to see, for sure), in my upcoming second installment I’ll talk about my single favorite redwood park. I’ll also talk briefly about seasonality and other logistics.

One of the wonders of the night and twilight skies is the moon, and yet the moon can be a challenging subject to integrate into a landscape shot. There are several reasons for this, exposure problems, apparent size, depth of field, getting the moon near the horizon and subject movement all take their turns at making landscape photography with the moon a challenge. In this post, I’ll outline the different challenges in incorporating the moon into your landscape photography, and then provide some suggestions for how to work with these different limitations.

The first problem most people run into is the size problem. For a variety of reasons, we usually “see”, subjectively, the moon as larger than it is, in a pure angular sense, it’s actually quite small, perhaps half a degree in diameter. How big of a telephoto do you need to handle this? Well, if you spent over $100,000 on Canon’s biggest baddest EF lens and popped it onto a full-frame camera with a 2x teleextender, the moon would still probably barely but entirely fit in the view. That’s 2400mm of effective focal length, so if you include the moon in a 24mm image, you can guess that the moon is going to be a lot smaller (not quite 100 times smaller, but that’s not a bad guess) than the frame. If you imagine a big moon in a wide, wide landscape, you’re likely to be disappointed, the math just doesn’t work.

Thus, it’s natural to start looking at more telephoto shots that include the moon and the landscape, and this too creates problems. Even as short as 100mm, stopping down to f/32 and perfectly setting the focus distance at 34 feet will only allow you good focus from 17 feet down to infinity, and the moon is still small at that focal length. At longer focal lengths, mountaintops are usually the only subject you have any hope of including with a moon and keeping both in focus.

Exposure is also a challenge. You’ll be surprised by just how much brighter the moon is than anything else in a night landscape, it’s as bright as a light colored rock in full sunlight-which is precisely what it is! In fact, it’s so bright, that in a typical single-exposure type of shot (HDR and other mixing techniques notwithstanding), that it’s impossible to hold detail in the moon and the landscape in the night, you really need to work near dusk or dawn.

A desire to put the moon near the horizon (where it’ll be easier to include with that mountaintop we’ve almost limited ourselves to) during dawn or dus

k means, as a result of the geometry of these things, that you’ll usually need to be shooting near when the moon is full, when the moon rises at sunset and vice versa. Perhaps you can get alpenglow and the moon in the same shot, such as in this sunrise image from Joshua Tree.   (There is a moon there, it’s quite small.)

“Snowy Pinnacles at Dusk”, above, makes use of many of these ideas, a rising moon (not full, the peak involved was very high in the sky above me, I was in a fjord) was taken handheld at ISO 400, 300mm, I think f/5. The closest peak is hundreds of yards away, the shot was made with a 300mm lens, and I was only barely able to keep both in focus, and just as importantly I was only barely able to hold detail in the moon and in the pinnacles, had the moon risen 30 minutes earlier I would have had a much easier time with the exposure range. While tricky, working through these challenges led me to creating what has proven to be a very popular image for me.

It was about six years back; I was very, very frustrated.

I’d set my sight on capturing a particular scene in fog, a lovely grove of second-growth redwoods, ferns, and a meandering stream in Butano State Park. The location is   about a 90-minute drive, followed by a fifteen-minute hike to reach. And this was the third time I’d make the trek, and this time, as the previous two times, the fog had lifted before I arrived. For the third time, I wasn’t going to get the shot I wanted. I almost headed home in defeat, but I knew better, and I resolved to keep looking and shooting, and that has been one of the smartest decisions I’ve ever made.

Shaking off the frustration that day, I started kicking around the stream, with it’s perfect leading line heading into the redwoods. I was struck by the uniform size and dark color of the pebbles in and around the stream, and spent a good bit of time looking for some macro opportunities before noticing a larger yellow rock in the stream, with a rust-colored leaf held against the yellow rock by the flow of water. While not tremendously exciting to me, I started working out compositions in which I could place the rock and the leaf near a corner of a shot of stream bed. Handheld was out of the question, I was shooting 50-speed Velvia, and I wanted to shoot straight down, so I started the chilly work of setting up my tripod in the stream to allow me to shoot nearly straight down.

Finally set up, I got a better look through the viewfinder and saw something that almost got me to give up. The rock kicked up the flow of the stream just enough that the water downstream was sparkling with reflections of the sun. I figured those reflections would ruin my perfect little “zen garden” composition, so I experimented for ten or fifteen minutes trying to get rid of them, with a polarizer, by adjusting the position of the camera, and so on. Again, I was frustrated; again, I pushed on.

I shot nearly a roll trying different combinations of position, polarization, and long-exposures trying to get rid of the things, and then headed home, almost certain I’d gotten nothing that day, but at least feeling good that I’d kept at it. When I got home that day I didn’t immediately get it processed, but a couple weeks later, I had the film processed with some other work I’d done, and when I got the slides back, there were the most beautiful patterns in the water, patterns I would have never seen if I hadn’t kept shooting. Investigating those patterns lead me to develop my series Signatures of the Sun.

That series led to one of my most successful exhibitions and a book in 2004, but that’s not all. Last year, the composer Sam Hamm in Montana approached me about a collaboration based on those works between myself, him and the pianist Jen Bratz. The resulting four-part piano composition debuted earlier this week in Boulder, CO, and will be reprised Thursday at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, MT. I’m writing this from Wyoming right now precisely because I didn’t give up that one, frustrating day.

My point? There’s a tremendous amount of serendipity in the photography business, and it’s essential, if you aspire to become a professional photographer, to keep at it, to keep shooting when conditions look tough, to keep your mind open to experimentation, to different possibilities.

Don’t give up, keep shooting!