Three Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) chicks sat in a nest about twenty-five feet above a wide path in Claremont Canyon right above the Claremont Hotel in Oakland, California. While I was there, Mom and Dad hovered higher up in nearby trees. The nest had been there for about a month, and was pretty well-known locally. I climbed up the...

This is a photo taken looking straight up one of the smaller, back staircases at the Marin Center, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The results are almost abstract: I don't think one is quite sure what one is looking at. There's very little Photoshop work here, just a bit of adjustment to compensate for the mixed-color-temperature light environment. Wright Stairs,...

This is a photo of a Papaver rhoeas 'Falling in Love,' a double variety of Papaver rhoeas, a kind of poppy. I cut a flower off the profusion of these poppies in our garden, and photographed this flower indoors. I put the flower in a glass flute to keep it upright, and placed the flute on a black velvet background....

If you've ever looked closely at a daffodil like this beautiful specimen, you'll know that within the outer yellow petals is an orange "trumpet" (sometimes the trumpet is yellow like the outer petals of the flower, not orange). The trumpet itself contains the reproductive parts of the flower: ovaries, pistil, and the stigma, style, and anthers shown in my photo...

I've been thinking a good bit lately about making black and white prints from certain of my digital images. Actually, since the final output would be using my digital printer, printing via offset, or display on a color monitor, what I'm really doing is to use the RGB (or CMYK) color notation to create a simulation of a black and...

There was a bright moon in the sky, and as I walked across the mud flats behind the Inverness General Store, my fear was that all that moonlight would detract from the starlight. As I set up my tripod, polka music came faintly from the Czech restaurant in Inverness. Vladimir's, it seems is still run by 78-year-old Vlad, and according...

The time has come, the walrus famously said, to talk of many things (thanks, Lewis Carroll). Rather than shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages, and kings, I tend to talk about digital photography. When I came back to photography, I had no idea that the techniques and aesthetics of this wonderful new medium would take over my life. I used a...

I photographed this interesting mixed Lily bouquet on black velvet, with natural daylight and a tungsten spot. As always in these situations, it pays to "under expose" the photo for a proper "creative" exposure---so the flowers become more saturated and the black background goes truly black. Creative exposures are explained in Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers, pages 118-121. Asiatic...

Rick Smolan gave me a coupon for a version of his book America at Home with a custom cover, and I put Julian and Nicky in the design (see below). Rick is famous for his Day in the Life series of photography books. Like many of Rick's projects, America at Home is extraordinarily creative in concept. Essentially, the notion of...

Finley Eversole contacted me for permission to use one of my chambered nautilus images in his book Art, Death and Transformation, to be published by Inner Traditions in 2009. Based on my conversation with Finley, he's a man with personal experience of the abstract expressionists. I gather that his book is about the relationalship of the spiritual to art,...