Ever since I was a kid and visited the Grand Canyon for an hour with my family, I have dreamed about going back and seeing the canyon from the river’s perspective. So when some friends invited my wife and me on a 21-day trip after they had waited 15 years for a private permit, it wasn’t hard to commit. The permit covered nearly the entire month of March, when crowds are smaller and no motorized boats or guides are allowed on the river.
My great-grandparents homesteaded in the northern part of the Black Hills around the turn of the 20th century, but found the environment too inhospitable for traditional farming and moved to eastern South Dakota. But that bond to the Black Hills continues to be passed down through my family, and I’ve visited the area on a regular basis since I was a little boy. My earliest travels with a camera were to the Black Hills during my early teens on family vacations, with resulting photos that failed to show how the area made me feel. As my photographic skills improved I’ve returned many times, but have only yet begun to scratch the surface of the numerous natural wonders located in the Black Hills.
If you’re a sucker for forested mountains, fjords, alpine lakes, crystalline streams, seaside villages, and very cosmopolitan cities, well, one anyway, I’d like to introduce you to a special place. In addition, if you’re in North America anyway, it’s easy to get to. This enchanted land is…drum roll…Vancouver Island.
Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, located in the Colorado Desert (two hours east of San Diego and three hours south of Los Angeles), is California’s largest state park. It’s also a World Biosphere Reserve meant to demonstrate a balanced relationship between man and nature.
The park encompasses 600,000 acres containing 500 miles of dirt roads, 12 wilderness...
Many photographers will walk out the door for a portrait shoot with little more than a camera and a reflector. They do so based on the common belief that flash photography is meant exclusively for indoor shooting, that flash is only used when there isn’t enough light to achieve a perfect exposure. However, based on my experience, a flash combined with a few affordable accessories has tremendous...
Ten years ago, when I was primarily a fashion photographer, I did a shoot in Cuba. Normally I’d have used medium and long telephoto lenses, but because the narrow streets I was shooting on featured colorfully painted walls, I switched to a 35mm lens. With that lens I was able to show not only the models but also the background, which revealed a bit about the location. Equally important, I...
Berlin is a vibrant city, alive with a history, culture, and counterculture all its own. I didn’t expect to fall in love with it, but did. Interestingly, everywhere you turn in this metropolis you see huge derricks craning their necks in the midst of constructing yet another building. While many scenes may reflect this burgeoning vitality, there are countless views free of any construction...
My wife and I live in an alternate universe. It’s called “RV Land.” We inhabit a vibrant subculture in which people live full-time in various types of recreational vehicles. An RV is a little home on wheels, able to carry computers and camera gear along with a full life support system. It requires a diet of gasoline but the expense seems trivial as we pass hundreds of motels...
Travel photographers call them fixers, and that’s what they do: they fix things to make sure the way is smooth so the photographer can do what he needs to do—get pictures that the average tourist can’t. And if you want those kinds of opportunities—in other words, if you’re really serious about your travel photography—there’s no substitute for a savvy...
I just dumped more sand out of my camera bag. This has been a fairly regular activity of mine for the last couple of months, ever since I visited Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in Colorado during a nasty wind. The physical exhaustion caused by climbing North America’s tallest dunes (750 feet, nearly straight up, in sand), the feeling of sand in my eyes and the resurfacing of...
This may surprise you, but I prefer to travel with single focal length lenses rather than zooms.
I have several reasons. First, my primes are usually one to two stops faster than zooms, which is important not so much because I shoot with my lenses wide-open but rather because the extra one or two stops of speed makes the image brighter in the viewfinder—which means...
As I kneel on the ground looking through my viewfinder at a particularly pleasing collection of tulips, it occurs to me that nothing grabs my attention more quickly than a display of nature’s bright colors, especially after a long, gray winter. And if color, flowers, and other photogenic subjects are what you crave, The Netherlands’ Lowlands—a swath approximately 35 miles long...
One of the things I always try to do when I’m planning a trip is check out the events calendars of the cities and towns I’ll be visiting to see what sort of festivals might be taking place. Sometimes I’ll even rearrange my schedule to make sure I hit those places at the right time; that’s how important it is for me to take advantage of these photo opportunities. Images of...
My route to travel photography was not direct, but looking back, I realize the direction was set fairly early.
While attending the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, I got a chance to spend a semester break photographing in Arkansas at the oldest bluegrass festival in the US. I never forgot how much I’d enjoyed photographing the festival and the local...
The Carrizo Plain National Monument, located in California’s Central Valley (a four-hour drive north of Los Angeles), is known as California’s “Serengeti” because of its plethora of wildlife diversity thriving in the last of California’s historic grasslands. This 50-mile stretch of sweeping grasslands lies between the Caliente and Temblor Mountain Ranges, one of my...
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