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...

In a world that is saturated with color, there is something about the elegant simplicity of black-and-white imagery that gets right to the heart of things. The removal of color allows our eyes and minds to focus on subtleties of shadow and shape in a way that's different from our everyday visual experience. Creating a beautiful black-and-white image can be...

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...

A few weeks ago, Scott Kelby, editor of Photoshop User magazine, invited me to submit a 5-minute technique for his weekly NAPP TV podcast (formerly Photoshop TV). It was a tough decision: Say "yes" and become a regular adjunct on an insanely popular video podcast or say "no" because . . . frankly, I never did come up with a...

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...