Outdoor/Travel

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“For uncounted centuries the highest mountains in the world have hidden a tiny jewel, the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan.”

For uncounted centuries the highest mountains in the world have hidden a tiny jewel, the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan. In 1999 my wife and I were watching a 60 Minutes episode when Morley Safer came on and said, “While most governments are concerned with...