Outdoor/Travel

I live on the East Coast, and I mean right on it. My studio is located about 8 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. People who live here love the beach, and of course the tourists who descend like swarming flies on a slain wildebeest every...

Often people will ask me, “How do you get that great color in your photos?” I appreciate the compliment, but it’s usually followed by, “You must do a lot of retouching.” Actually I don’t. I will do a little color enhancement, but how color looks in my images has to do partly with how I set certain camera controls, how I control or use lighting in the scene, and how I compose the photograph.

When hiking or traveling with my SLR system, whether 35mm or digital, I prefer hand holding the camera to shoot nature and scenic views. Yet the value of a tripod is not lost on me, especially when confronted with the relatively long exposures required to capture a gracefully cascading waterfall or the warm glow of a sunset, or when employing a long lens with wildlife (especially...

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...

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...

Outdoor photography is a favorite with Shutterbug readers so this was a very competitive assignment. But we were looking for more than just your summer vacation photos at Yosemite: we were seeking something both beautiful and different. We also asked you to keep your mind open for what’s considered “The Great Outdoors.” We were looking for everything from images of the majestic wonder in Denali National Park in Alaska, to the delicate pink-hued skies of Key West, to a stunning vista as seen right from your backyard. Most importantly, we asked you to remember to keep the “great” in the Great Outdoors with your photography submissions for this assignment.