In the garden in the early morning I found rain drops suspended on a spider's web. Nearby, pink Gerbera Daisies grew. These flowers were reflected and contained in the water drops. The technical challenge was to obtain high depth-of-field with subjects in constant motion from the wind, subjects so tiny that any motion was magnified. I locked the camera's mirror...

The photo you see below is from the end of the Berkeley Pier looking towards the Golden Gate Bridge. The Berkeley pier seems like it goes half way across San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz, but at one time it must have stretched futher than it does now. The boards block the end of the pier, prevent people from falling into...

I ordered some bare-root dahlias from Swan Island Dahlias, and planted them in the late spring. This is a photo, taken at f/64 for maximum depth-of-field in sunlight in my garden, of one of the first serious flowers from these dahlia plants. The aperture, f/64, is one of the smallest available lens apertures and therefore provides the greatest depth-of-field. How...

How do you work with landscapes that show an extravagant dynamic range? I was down by the Bay photographing sunset. It was clear to me that the scene had great dynamic range, from the blown-out highlights in the clouds to the deep shadows in the rocks along the shoreline. My normal approach to this situation is a kind of ad-hoc...

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...