The most important thing I teach my photography tour clients is how to anticipate a shot. Let’s use my new image of the fall colors on Mazama Ridge as an example of when to shoot. When I was at Mount Rainier National Park last Friday, the sky was clear blue without a single cloud on the horizon. I knew that the best image in these conditions would be when the angle of the sunlight was a few degrees above the horizon and still yellow or orange in color. Experience has taught me where the sun would go down, but I confirmed my guess by using my SunSeeker app on my iPhone. I wanted to shoot this scene as the sunset light settled into the trees and danced across the foliage in front of my camera. The tree shadows added some mystery to an otherwise beautiful but non-dramatic scene. This light only lasted for about 30 seconds before the foliage went into complete shade. I used my Carl Zeiss 35mm f2 ZE lens along with my Singh-Ray LB Warming Polarizer and 2-stop Hard Graduated Neutral Density filter to create this image using only 1 exposure which required minimal processing.

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This past Friday, the second in a row, I woke up at 2:30am and drove down to Mount Rainier National Park to photograph wildflowers at sunrise.  I have sold a lot of images of Mount Rainier over the years, so it is worth taking the time out of my busy travel schedule to do the quick round trip for just 1 hour of shooting.  I parked my car at 5:15am and ran up the trail in about 20 minutes to my favorite flower meadows on Mazama Ridge.  I’m always surprised that I never encounter any other photographers up there at sunrise, but I also only visit during the week to avoid the weekend crowds.  For anyone still planning a trip to Rainier, the wildflowers are at their peak, however, I would not describe this year’s bloom as more than ordinary.  I did not encounter any diverse fields of wildflowers and the clouds from the day before had vanished, but I still hoped to create a new unique image.  All of my previous well-known photos of wildflowers at Mount Rainier were created using medium and large format film cameras.  What a pain in the ass that was.  With my large format camera in particular, I had to compose the image using a dark cloth, focusing loupe, and dark ground glass where the image was upside down and reversed, spot meter the scene, stop down to f32, place a Singh-Ray non-LB Warming Polarizer on the lens, position the grad filter correctly, and hope that the wind stopped blowing for a 10-30 second exposure because I was using Fuji Velvia 50 film rated at ISO 25 due to reciprocity failure.  Still with me?  Let me just state unequivocally that creating this image with my dSLR was a lot easier.  I like this picture because of the soft warm light illuminating the lupine in the foreground.

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I was recently interviewed by the Gesellschaft Deutscher Tierfotografen (Society of German Nature Photographers).  Previously interviewed photographers include Andy Rouse, George and Verena Popp, Norbert Rosing, and Kevin Schafer.  My interview is currently featured in their triannual magazine Forum Naturfotografie.  It spans 14 pages and showcases 12 of my favorite photographs.  The double page opener is my image “East Pond Vent 1“, taken in Volcanoes National Park in Hawaii.  You can view the entire article here, however, it is in German.

My image “Spray Park Wildflowers 1” is featured as the double page opener of the hiking feature in the June 2010 issue of Seattle Met.  Spray Park is my favorite alpine location at Mount Rainier National Park and is the closest side of the mountain to my home in Seattle.  During the brief summer hiking season, I depart my house in the early afternoon, drive for about 3 hours, and hike the 3 miles up to the wildflower meadows to photograph the sunset.  It is both a blessing and a curse if the wind is not blowing, a blessing because the fields of lupine and paintbrush are not blowing around in the wind, but a curse because of  the swarms of blood-thirsty mosquitoes that rival any that I have seen in Alaska or Canada.  Spray Park is higher than Paradise on the south side of the mountain, so the wildflowers peak about 1 week later, typically mid-August.  Based on the cold summer that we are having, I estimate that the wildflowers are going to be a little late this year, which is similar to the year that I created this image during the last week of August.

The new issue of Hawai’i magazine has just hit the newsstand and I have the cover image! I provided them with several images a few months ago. They were so impressed with my work that they decided to use my image “East Pond Lava Vent” on the cover of their February issue which commemorates the 25th Anniversary of the Kilauea eruption that started on Jan 3, 1983.
Please visit my Publication Credits page to learn more about my nature photography publishing business or visit my Hawaii Volcanoes National Park Photography page to see more of my Hawaiian images.

My image, “East Pond Lava Vent” (vertical) was published in Nature’s Best magazine’s 2006 Photography Awards issue. It was recently selected from the 120 images that made up the awards to be one of the few images on display in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, DC this winter. It was awarded Highly Honored in the Art In Nature Category.  The exhibit opens Nov 16th to the public and will run through April 2007.