I originally got this cool Iris ensata 'Azuma-kagami' as a bare root plant from White Flower Farms, planted it in my garden, and forgot about it. Yesterday, we saw this flower. It struck me as surpassingly beautiful, and I photographed it yesterday and today in-studio. For this shot, I photographed the Iris ensata 'Azuma-kagami' (I do like how the name...

I spent most of the morning recently photographing water drops on a single pink Gerbera daisy in my garden. This was engrossing, fun, and satisfying. As I worked, I realized the task required a great deal of patience. But not much fortitude: my garden was my model, I did not have to shlepp my equipment very far, and I literally...

In the Eisenhower-era movie The Incredible Shrinking Man, the hero begins shrinking after accidental exposure to radiation and insectiside. In the end, always growing tinier, after numerous battles with house cats, spiders, and successively smaller creatures, the hero keeps his dignity and soliloquizes, "So close - the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly, I knew they were really the two...

I'm reading the wonderful Aubrey-Maturin series of sea stories aloud to my oldest son, Julian. If you stick around "lucky" Captain Jack Aubrey, you'll surely come to recognize his motto, "There's no time to be lost!" Funny, but I don't often think of landscape photography as something where rushing is important. But the theme of three recent photo sessions, all...

This is a very long time exposure taken from the top of Half Dome. It was around 1AM. I pointed the camera straight up towards the sky facing north. Here's what I wrote in my diary: I am taking photos after midnight, the camera on tripod open for half an hour at a shot. It is cold. Not so much...

At the end of June this year, the full moon rose in the eastern sky at about sunset (although by July 2 after dark). This cosmologic timing gave me the chance to consider extravagant dynamic range. In other words, what can you do with captures in which the dynamic range is simply too great to process for both bright areas...

I've relaunched my Digital Night website. It's greatly expanded, with tips, techniques, and geographic sections. This site is an archive of my stories about photographing the landscapes of the night. The geographic sections are for Point Reyes, Yosemite, San Francisco, and Marin Headlands. Check it out: www.digitalnight.us. View this image larger. Read the back story featuring this image....

Mark and I went back out to Arch Rock last night. It was a little earlier than my last hike out there, so I was able to work my way down the little canyon and across a couple of rock faces to the beach, where I photographed the arch in Arch Rock in the gathering dusk. Of course, I also...

My Dad says he told a group of his friends that he just bought a $25,000 computer. Understand that these friends were a bunch of computer scientists. Everyone thought my father had bought some really macho heavy digital iron. Completing the punch line, my dear father said, describing his Toyota Prius, "and it even came with a steering wheel and...

If you grant my premise that digital photography is an entirely new medium of expression, then you have to wonder about the prevalence of metaphors that use the techniques of analog photography. In Photoshop, we use the Dodge and Burn tools. We "cross process" using Nik's excellent library of Photoshop filters (among other digital "cross processing" techniques). We produce versions...