Another year has come and gone. And wow, what a year it was. This year, I was fortunate enough to check off several bucket list items from my list. I’m well aware that one of those items, the eruption of Kilauea, was a highly destructive event for many other people, and my heart continues to go out to all of those affected. I am in awe of the natural beauty and raw nature I witnessed. All told, including time lapse frames, I shot more than three terabytes of RAW files this year, which is a new record. Storage is really starting to become an issue as I deal with (and back up) more and more data each year. I have marked over 2200 images as “picks” among the nearly 48,000 raw files. In my own super simple organizational hierarchy, I define an image flagged as a pick in Adobe Lightroom to be one that is worthy of further exploration and is potentially postable online when I circle back later and look at the picks with more scrutiny. From that 2200…. I have whittled it down to just ten. Is this ten the correct “best of 2018”? Maybe? I’ve been sifting through my images from this year for weeks and I’m just going by feeling at this point. Perhaps in a month I’ll read this post and think “oh no I should have included that other image instead” or “what was I thinking?” I could for instance easily fill up a 10 best list with just images of red hot molten lava in Hawaii, or another top 10 list of just Yosemite Valley under fresh snow. But I forced myself to just do 10 overall, and for better or worse here they are. We start first in Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada, which is a park I had been wanting to visit for years and just somehow never got there until the New Year. In fact, I sat at the campground in Valley of Fire and compiled last year’s 10 best while in the park.

On this trip to bring in the New Year of 2018, I had a brand new lens in my collection that I was eager to try out. That lens is the Canon 11-24mm f4L. It is an incredibly wide wide-angle lens, with a rectilinear (not fisheye) focal length of just 11mm and a field of view of an enormous 126mm. I’ve seen a lot of views of this location, called the Fire Wave, and I think so far as I can tell my 11mm composition here looking over the dry fall is pretty unique. Add to that the soft light and gorgeous sunrise clouds and perhaps you can see why I selected this image alone of all the ones I took on that trip (which also included Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Capitol Reef).

Fast forward to March and the stars aligned for me. On the night of March 2nd, an amazing alignment happened. A winter Yosemite snowstorm bringing snow to the valley floor at just 3800 feet was coming and it was going to coincide with a weekend that I could escape my day job. Not only would I get to experience a rare snowfall event in the valley, but it was going to be a big one. After work on Friday night I drove my car up north, sleeping in my car at a rest stop for a few hours before finally arriving at the park around 7am. Between 18 and 24 inches of fresh snow were in the park. Every single tree branch and granite wall was completely covered in snow. In short, it was a true winter wonderland and I felt as though I had stepped inside an Ansel Adams photograph. Narrowing all the images I took on that Saturday and Sunday is difficult, but I come back again and again to this other ultra-wide image from along the banks of the Merced River. I keep coming back again and again to this image and staring at it, getting lost in the puffs of white snow that cover every rock.

I cannot wait to come back to Yosemite one day in the snow again. It was just amazing. And speaking of snow, I came back just two weeks later for another storm, but this time I stayed a little further south and went to Sequoia National Park. Just like Yosemite, for years I had wanted to visit the great red trees in the snow. And at long last, I did. I captured this image of the General Sherman, the largest tree by volume on the Earth (no slouch for height either). The way the red bark stands out against the white snow is truly a superlative experience.

By far my most incredible photographic experience in 2018, indeed in my entire life, came at the end of July. For years I have wanted to see the lava lake on Kilauea. I wanted to visit hopefully before my friend Sean Goebel left the Big Island. I was working like crazy trying to finish the visual effects of a movie at my day job when in May the eruption began. During long hours at work I watched as fissures started to crack open in the Lower East Rift Zone, and the webcams of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory as the lava lake drained completely from sight. After the lava lake drained from view earthquakes and explosions started happening at the summit, and then finally lava started erupting in Leilani Estates. I watched endlessly the videos of the eruption, including streaming live webcams at my desk while I toiled on the movie. I resolved to go to Hawaii just as soon as I could, but my hope that I could witness Kilauea in action were dim as I ended up arriving more than 90 days after the start of the eruption and the previous similar eruptions had lasted at most 88 days. But at last on the 93rd day of the eruption, as it was already winding down, two friends and I flew a charter helicopter from Paradise Helicopters over the lava rivers and the ocean entry.

Having never flown before in a helicopter, let alone one with no doors over a lava river, the experience was incredible. Here we see the view looking towards Fissure 8, the eruptive point for the majority of the lava. The molten river of basalt reached as much as 1300 feet wide near the source before breaking into braids in the same manner that a water river does. At its height, 26,000 gallons per second were effusing from the fissure where lava was expelled at 18 miles per hour. The flow was hot enough and the flow was fast enough to remain molten all the way to the ocean 8 miles away without crusting over. We were not allowed to fly lower than 3,000 feet, but all I can really say is wow!

I could post dozens more photos from the air, but I’ve chosen to limit myself to just one lava shot from the air, and one lava shot from the water for the purpose of this list. Having seen the eruption by air at sunrise, later the same day we made our way by boat to the ocean entry. Through very choppy water in which our 40 foot boat took flight over the top of a wave, we arrived at the bizarre and otherworldly scene of boiling oceans and fresh land. Clouds of saltwater steam, hydrochorlic acid, and tiny particles of glass stream into the air. This unfriendly mixture is called “laze” and is not something you want to spend time in. The USGS likens it to a cloud of diffuse battery acid. The trade winds were constantly blowing the laze inland when we were there, and it would form into interesting shapes at times. I managed to capture this moment where it, in my mind, formed a dragon hovering just above the hot land at sunset.

The next day my friend took us along to the summit of Mauna Kea to shoot night photography and time lapse of the observatories there. At 13,800 feet, the view of the night sky is quite amazing up there, and in this view three of the telescopes, Keck I, Keck II, and Subaru, stand out against the stars in a 15 minute exposure. The two Keck telescopes were using their high powered lasers for use with their adaptive optics systems. These systems act in essence like noise cancelling headphones but for atmospheric distortions. Faintly just to the right of Subaru Telescope is a green laser coming from the top of Mauna Loa. With freezing temperatures and clear skies high above the tropical warmth and rain down below, it was an amazing experience. We could see the lava river from up there too.

Continuing with the night sky in my first visit to Hawaii, we spent a sleepless night photographing at Papakōlea Beach at the southern end of the Big Island. In this view, nearly two hours of two minute exposures have been added together to get the view looking north over the little bay. The green sand beach is at the left just under the North Star and the swirl of stars around it. On the right some clouds and half a moon provide illumination of the landscape. This was one of very few star trail photos I managed to take this year.

From Hawaii this list veers into more familiar territory, with one of my favorite places: The Alabama Hills. I have long held this little section of Movie Road to be special, even before it became a star of Instagram photos galore. This fall after shooting sunrise at one of the arches I was heading back to camp when a rainbow appeared. I pulled over and composed this image, which I think captures the spirit of this place on a fall morning. A storm hovers over the Sierra Nevada crest and the rocky landscape of the Alabama Hills granite looks just magnificent in the morning light.

On the theme of “I’ve been wanting to shoot X for years” we come next to North Lake in the Sierra Nevada. This lake is perhaps the most popular single fall color spot I can think of in all the Sierras. And for years I have wanted to be there in the fall when weather happened, since in the fall the odds of weather happening on a day of the week when I can intercept it are very small. And that storm would have to happen too in the small window of when color is at its peak. Well just like the stars aligned for Yosemite snow, they aligned for a dusting of snow and fantastic morning light for me here. It came down to 50-50 between this image and this one. From one moment to the next I honestly could swap either of these into the list.

I don’t know how many times I drove past this tree before finally taking note of it in fall 2017. Lots. But that fall I ventured over to see and photograph it, and while it was pretty neat the tree itself was a little past prime then. In fall of this year however the time was right. This lone cottonwood was in its full prime golden color. Last year I didn’t quite figure out how to get the composition I really wanted. This year I made it happen. I stood on top of a rock and pointed my camera crookedly on the tripod towards the tree. Then I used the whole tripod to extend the camera up above my head and to the left, clumsily looking at the camera’s view through my phone. I framed Mount Whitney to the left of the tree and clicked the shutter before reeling the tripod back down. I gave it a few tries before I achieved the image I was after. I think perhaps I will be returning here in other seasons to see how this tree looks. I feel like this image captures fall there quite perfectly, with afternoon light providing backlight for the glorious color of the leaves.

That concludes my list for this year. It’s fun to go through the mental exercise to really force yourself to cut through what you may consider to be the best of the year. From over 2200 to just 10 is quite challenging. I could easily do a top 100. In fact I have a best of 2018 gallery on my iPad that is just over 200 images. It’s just been that great of a year. I hope you have had a great year too. I look forward to what new adventures await in 2019. And let’s just say my new year’s resolution is to write more blog entries, seeing how the last one was the 10 best of 2017. I will make time to write more. Happy New Year!

10ish favorites of 2017

It’s the end of the year. Literally. As I write this, I’m sitting at the picnic table of my campsite in Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada. This year I had an overwhelming desire to get away to start the year. I am overdue for a proper solo road trip, and I was determined to take advantage of the time away from the day job to start the year far from the city where I spend most of my days. After spending far too short time visiting family over Christmas, I finally mustered my over-stuffed Xterra onto the highway this morning, on December 31st. On to the list!

The year started off with spectacular flooding in Death Valley National Park at Badwater. I last witnessed this phenomenon in 2011 and it produced some of my all time favorite images. The park was magical this last winter, and we begin our chronological list with Badwater by star light. To the extreme detriment of my boots, I waded out into the cold salty waters at sunset, where I ran into fellow photographer Jay Tayang, and then returned around midnight after the moon had set for some self portrait action. In addition to that, I shot a few pure star light shots, and I really like the way this looks.

Moving on to the next image, I found this scene unfolding as I was literally moving on from Badwater to… I don’t remember where. This scene unfolded on the other side of the valley and I quickly pulled over and shot it as the crack in the clouds beamed down onto the gentle slopes of alluvium in the Panamint Range. You always have to be watching what is happening with the light around you, especially when there is weather. Non-cloudless days are more the exception rather than the rule in Death Valley, and while I try to anticipate what is going to happen based on experience, this would be hard to predict.

Having taken sunset and sunrise shots at Badwater with the shallow flood, one of the mornings I headed for higher ground. I went high up to Dante’s View, more than a mile above. However, somewhat comically I noticed that the very top of that drive was in the clouds. Nevertheless, I was committed, and set up a couple of cameras anyway hoping for a break in the clouds. To my delight, for a brief moment the cloud roof lifted just enough to peer at the shimmering reflection in the waters down below. The clouds right in my face were still in the shadow of the Black Mountains, and thus were colored deep blue being illuminated by the sky. Looking down at the reflection below, you can make out the reflected direct sunlight of the clouds towards the far side of the Valley, providing a sharp contrast with the shadow blue world I was still in. It didn’t last long before the roof descended down again, but this resulting image is one of my all-time favorites. Although it is also a very frustrating one as the camera sensor turned out to be extraordinarily dirty.

After the waters receded in Death Valley, hope of a superbloom emerged. However, since Death Valley had its superbloom in 2016, the seed bank was depleted, and the superbloom was left to other areas that didn’t go off in 2016 such as Anza Borrego Desert State Park near the Salton Sea. I had always wanted to go to this park, and the promise of a superbloom there was a powerful lure… for me and about a million of my closest friends. Ben Horne I recall was also turned off by the hordes and moved on. So, brushing the flowers aside, I hit up Fonts Point for sunrise and it was magical. The clouds lit up red like fire over the eroded wonder badlands of this neat park.

While the crowds turned me away from Anza Borrego for flowers, Carrizo Plain National Monument’s superbloom sucked me right in. What a neat place! Another photographer had a famous photo of this place during such a bloom referring to it as “Where God Spilled the Paint.” I definitely agree that it does look like spilled paint, and I captured some for my own. My two weekends here were dramatic, with me helping to rescue a stuck vehicle in the mud the first visit and then witnessing and helping another driver who catapulted in reverse a few hundred feet down a ravine on the next. See the video of that here.

Next up is an image of some of the unusual tufa of Mono Lake. These are sometimes called the “sand tufa” because they seem to be made of sand and are far smaller than their carbonate cousins famously lining the lake. I’ve tried before to capture these little sand cities, which remind me of Paolo Soleri’s arcologies. They truly seem like they could be cities out of a scifi movie.

And of course, the Eclipse. This image is from our pool of images from the 36 hour time lapse of the Great American Eclipse as seen over Sawtooth Lake in Idaho’s Sawtooh Mountains. This was my first backpacking trip outside of California and it was amazing. The landscape there is stunningly beautiful. When the eclipse totality arrived, I was unprepared for how awesome it was. Like a light switch going off, a faded daylight suddenly turned into twilight with a 360-degree sunset encircling us. It was incredible, and I hope to repeat this experience in 7 years when another Great Eclipse comes to North America.

Over the years I’ve made many, many trips to the Eastern Sierras chasing fall color. I’ve had mixed results from this, and have always wanted to get a great image of the color along one fo the forks of Bishop Creek. I finally got a composition that I liked, with the reflected canyon light providing soft color and the shade allowing for nicely blurred water. I like how the tree trunk bits point into the water.

Number 9 is a sort of 4-way split. It’s all the same sunset, but the full pano is just overwhelmingly wide. I needed to switch to a 16mm or wider lens in the vertical position to capture the feeling of it a bit better, but instead I have broken it into 3 chunks which each show about 60 degrees of view horizontally. Really I’d like to include a whole bunch more from this sunset, as it is one of the most amazing ones I’ve seen.

Number 10 is this capture of the anticrepuscular rays from Owens Lake. I had no idea this was a thing that could happen until I looked over and noticed it happening the very next day after the sunset pano I was just discussing. Some fog and dust near the ground was thick enough to catch the rays bouncing up from the sunlight reflected from the surface of Owens Lake. It was an incredible unexpected sight amid an intense and beautiful sunrise.

And finally, a bonus. A self portrait of my father and I in the White Mountains. We visited the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest and after dinner I set about to take a photo of the two of us with the Milky Way. It was such a treat to take him with me on a little photo trip and I can’t wait to do it again.

Well that about does it. I can’t wait to see what photo adventures 2018 brings. So far, in Valley of Fire, it’s off to a tremendous start.

It’s that time of the year again. It’s the time of year when we like to collectively examine what has transpired within this unit of time measure of a year. Our collective demarcation of an Earth solar orbit is a significant time scale for us humans, and thus I will attempt to decide on this year’s “10 Best” within that framework as I have been doing for several years now. If nothing else this exercise is great for forcing me to look back on where I’ve been and what I’ve seen and to prioritize images that stick out for one reason or another. For many years I have been largely captivated by Death Valley. I do truly love that park, but by far the dominant National Park for me was Yosemite. But before we get to Yosemite, we start far closer to home in Venice where a stroll to the beach after a storm produced this moment.

It had rained for several hours until finally, just at sunset, this winter storm back on January 6 broke and the sun shone through in warm sunset tones. The basketball courts of Venice Beach were covered in a thin layer of water that acted as a mirror, broken up by the subtle relief in the court surface as the water drains away. A couple of sea gulls also provide extra breakup.

Next up we have a return for me to a familiar favorite place: Manhattan Beach Pier. I have loved this pier since the moment I laid eyes on it for the first time in 1996. One day, a number of years ago, I discovered how interesting it can be at night. This time, I arrived just before dawn. The pre-dawn light lifted the sky out of darkness while the odd mixture of lights on the pier provided a colorful palette.

My first trip to Yosemite for the year was a trek to the “fire falls” of Horsetail Falls in February. With this annual event, the sun shines through a small gap to the west to light up Horsetail Falls off the side of El Capitan. This event requires certain wet conditions to be met as the falls only flows after relatively recent storms. I tried to get a perspective away from the hordes of photographers in the valley. While I didn’t quite get to the spot I really wanted, I did watch this < formation drift up the face of El Capitan until it reached this alignment. Ultimately I found this more interesting than any of the fire falls photos I made this trip and it remains one of my favorites of the year.

If you follow my photography you might find the regular landscapes are on occasion interrupted by my love of steam trains. The San Bernardino Railroad Historical Society earlier this year had a night photography session during the brief time that they had their magnificent locomotive, Santa Fe 3751, at the Fullerton Railroad Days event. I wasn’t really expecting a show but wow did they put one on! They lit the fire back on this oil burning locomotive and spent some steam through the cylinder cocks (out the sides) and the dynamos on top and of course out the smokestack. Some flash photography was coordinated but by far my favorite shot I’ve yet taken of a steam locomotive is this one with no flash but just a long exposure.

What can I say about these next two. Yosemite! Like my 97 Switchbacks At Night, these two images feature a well known trail traced by light at night. Unlike that project, this one is done digitally. These images are a shared copyright with friends Sean Goebel and Wade Meade. Spearheaded by Sean, we hauled a ton of gear up to the top of Mount Watkins while Wade scaled Half Dome alone in the dark. Filmed from across the valley with a variety of cameras and lenses, these two images are my versions of the stills, one wide and one closeup. Processing was labor intensive to minimize noise and to remove dozens of airplane trails, but the results were worth it. Check out the time lapse video too. The views of Yosemite Valley from up there were incredible.

This next image is one of the most remarkable sunsets I’ve ever seen in my time in southern California. I was fortunate enough to escape the day job for a few moments to run down to the beach. Just as the sunset was peaking a surfer walked up and started to head into the waves in the fading but spectacular light.

The so-called “super moon” sets over the waters of the Pacific Ocean at dawn in this surreal image. I was down at Manhattan Beach Pier and had almost given up on shooting for the morning when I saw how strange the moon looked just as it was setting on the horizon line. On a Sony a6300 at 400mm, the 600mm equivalent view shows the bizarrely distorted shapes of the moon and the equally strange colors of the ocean reflecting the morning pastel colors of a newly rising sun. It’s just so weird and thus it has remained one of my favorites this year.

In my final trip to Yosemite of the year, I headed in knowing that an incoming storm was likely. After watching a very nice sunset at Tunnel View, I stayed to try to capture the rapid movement of the clouds above. I ended up utilizing a 10-stop neutral density filter to elongate the exposure to a little over two minutes. This allowed the clouds to streak across the sky in the direction of their movement. After first processing this in color I later switched to black and white and love this version quite a bit more.

And finally, we have sunrise the next morning at the place I always think of as “Gates of the Valley” due to the photo by that name of the most famous of landscape photographers. Getting up at 4:30am was worth it. Hope had not been great for this particular morning, but a break in the clouds to the East made for a few minutes of color explosion across the sky. I’ve been staring at this photo as my desktop for weeks and have really grown fond of it.

So there you have it. As of this moment anyway, there are 10 favorites for 2016. I hope you have enjoyed them and I can’t wait to share more images with you in the future. Happy new year!

2015 has come to an end, and once again it’s time to look back and pick 10 favorite images from the year. After careful consideration this is the list I came up with. I hope you enjoy. If you feel I missed one, please tell me down in the comments.

This year started with a neat event in Los Angeles. To mark the anniversary of the Los Angeles Marathon, ASICS pointed 26 clusters of lights straight up to mark each mile of the course. I barely was able to complete this panorama before they turned out the lights.

On a cold morning, I woke to this gorgeous scene at Aguereberry Point high in the Panamint Mountains in Death Valley National Park back in March.

Rounding out my panoramas from the year is this beautiful sunrise from the base of the Sierras.

Continuing with my ongoing obsession with finding trees that stick out, I was ecstatic to find this spectacular red maple nestled among evergreens in Massachusetts this fall.

On a bright afternoon, stormy skies bustled around Mount Whitney, the tallest point in the Sierra Nevada and the rest of the 48 states.

This year I finally was able to go to Europe! I had an amazing trip, starting in London and going to Paris, Berlin, Munich, Venice, Pompeii, Sorrento, Amalfi, and Rome. Here is one of my all time favorite photos from the trip, showing the famous gondolas of Venice.

In another view of Venice, this time at night, a man walks along the still waters of the canals.

After my trip was completely booked, I learned that a total lunar eclipse was happening during the “supermoon” closest approach of the Moon in its orbit. I originally envisioned a shot over the pyramid of the Louvre in Paris, but found the entire courtyard area closed off at 4am. With the eclipse starting, I set off in search of a different foreground and stumbled across this Egyptian obelisk.

Manhattan Beach Pier has always been a favorite photo spot for me ever since my first visit in 1996. For years I have hoped for a great sunset there and finally caught one there.

I love lightning photos. This is why I bought a lightning trigger. However in this case my lightning trigger was thousands of miles away while I was on vacation. While staying at hotel in South Carolina, I managed to luckily capture this strike during a 10 second exposure from an incredibly energetic thunderstorm.

Last year due to crazy busy holidays I didn’t have a chance to post a 10 best photos of 2014. It was an amazing year. Top honors goes to this photo I captured at the Maroon Bells of lightning striking the peak during my road trip to Colorado in the fall.

I also did some night photography up in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. My favorite shot being this self portrait.

I found the Sneffels Range in Colorado to be absolutely spectacular. Here a storm was raining ice pellets in the late afternoon. The lower elevation aspens were just starting to show signs of changing while the upper elevations were brilliant gold. I found this quality of light to be superb.

In July I went up to the 97 switchbacks again with some new friends to re-capture them at night, this time with digital cameras. Instead of one long exposure on film, these are done with multiple 30 second exposures, which are added together in processing.

While on that expedition, we were greeted by a morning thunderstorm that broke just at sunrise. Here the storm is parting over Mount Muir.

I have always been fascinated by trees that stick out from their surroundings. In the valley of the Maroon Bells this group of aspens struck me from across the valley.

On the subject of aspens, they are among my favorite trees. I have sought for a long time to find a dense aspen forest. In Kebler Pass in Colorado, I finally found one.

At long last I got to visit the spectacular Oregon Coast.

While visiting Lassen Volcanic National Park, I came across this scene at sunrise. I loved the color reflecting off of the fog and through the the thin clouds above.

Finally, I close out the top 10 with this remarkable forest, also in Lassen Volcanic National Park. Tree after tree was covered in brilliant green lichen, enriched by wet, overcast conditions.