Outdoor/Travel

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...

It was late afternoon on my last day in Big Bend National Park. I faced east where the Chisos Mountains rose up in steep cliffs from the desert. A few days after the New Year, there was a slight chill in the air but I was not thinking about the temperature. Rather, I was concentrating on the rapidly shifting light as the sun sank and clouds moved back and forth. With my camera mounted on a...

Like most photographers, I like to play around and constantly explore Photoshop. But I'm a businessman, too, so I need to be careful about how much time I spend in front of the computer. The more time I spend there, the less I have for taking photos and marketing my services, and that's where I make money. So I've always adopted the philosophy of getting it right...

Here are a few things AJ Neste's learned about photographing surfers:
One, it's the singer, not the song. "The most important part of being successful at this," he says, "is knowing the surfer. It's not just showing up somewhere and taking photos of random surfers. You won't know their personal style."

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