In early June, we headed to Iceland for an 18-day photo trip. If you have visited Iceland yourself, you will not be surprised to hear that the weather was quite challenging and we had to completely change our plans in response. While we hoped to take our rental 4x4 campervan into the interior highlands, we ended up mostly sticking to the Ring Road because of rain, relentless wind, and quite a bit of late-season snow. Despite these challenges, we still had a lot of fun experiences, including visiting a puffin colony in the snow, photographing Iceland's incredible river deltas, and seeing a perfectly peak lupine bloom across the southern portion of the country (this non-native lupine is invasive but still quite beautiful to see).
I have collected my photos from the trip into a 129-page PDF ebook portfolio, which you can download for free without any sign-up or checkout required. Below is the brief essay I include at the beginning of the ebook, along with a handful of the 100+ photos from the book.
Read MoreThis is the third in a series of three posts featuring my photographs from Death Valley National Park taken over the 2023-2024 winter season (first part here, second part here).
Death Valley is known for many things: the salt flats and polygons at Badwater Basin, the various sand dunes scattered across the park, and the impressive and colorful badlands. Perhaps less appreciated are the mountains, alluvial fans, and canyons spread across the park—and the rocks that comprise them.
Read MoreThis is the second in a three part series of photos from Death Valley taken this winter (see first post here). This post is about Lake Manly.
Lake Manly was a permanent feature in Death Valley until it evaporated about 10,000 years ago and now only forms during periods of heavy rainfall. During Hurricane Hilary in August 2023, heavy rains repopulated the ephemeral lake, and atmospheric river events in January actually raised the water level. During a few wind events in late February, the lake blew to the north before resettling back south and finally fully evaporating by May 2024. Watching the lake move was a surreal experience. Photographer Jerry Dodrill shared a video of the lake actually moving on his Instagram page and you can view it here.
Read MoreSarah and I spent almost ten weeks in and around Death Valley this winter in our trailer. Our first trip was a quick (for us) week-long visit in December to see the ephemeral Lake Manly before it evaporated. We followed that up with a longer eight-week trip starting in late January, during which our “ephemeral” lake refilled with several atmospheric river events in California. The winter weather was wet, providing many opportunities (lakes, wildflowers, and even fog), but it also closed the roads to many of the park’s further reaches.
Read MoreWhile I am sometimes successful in avoiding cliches in my photographs, I am less successful in avoiding cliches for my blog posts. So here is my version of the yearly recap post!
The beginning of the year is a good time to reflect and ruminate on the past year, but since this is the end of the year, I’m going to skip all that and just share some photographs. These are not necessarily my favorite twenty photographs of the year but they are a diverse selection of the places we photographed and visited in 2023, arranged chronologically.
Read MoreAfter a very busy fall, I finally had time to process my photos from Alaska. The results can be downloaded here, as a portfolio ebook with about 100 new photographs. There are autumnal landscapes and plants, mountains, glaciers, misty fjords and ocean scenes, and even some wildlife sprinkled in this new collection. I have included a small sampling of the photographs in this blog post but they will look better in the ebook.
As I mention in the ebook, the size, scope, and wildness of Alaska is difficult to articulate. A map provides an intellectual approximation of its size, but the emotional realization of how big a place Alaska is doesn’t really settle in until visiting in person and for several weeks. This is the perspective I have from driving around the very small slice of Alaska that is paved (or well graded) within a reasonable distance of its largest population center. Even that “less wild” part was incredible—imagine the overwhelming majority of the state which is inaccessible except by water or plane. Hopefully in the future we won’t have to imagine, as we plan on making several return visits.
Read MoreAfter a busy fall in Colorado, the Adirondacks, Vermont, Maine, and Zion we took a needed break before heading to Death Valley in late December with our trailer and staying there nearly 8 weeks. That is a long time in a single place, but like every visit to Death Valley, we only scratched the surface of what is there to see and explore. Most free weekends were spent exploring the many canyons in and near the park. I have now visited over 60 Death Valley canyons - many without names and most with a few surprises.
Canyons (and the rocks within them) make up a large portion of my recent gallery of photographs from Death Valley, I have included a few favorites in this post, but see the full gallery for much more.
Read MoreSarah and I have had a busy last few months. Since late August we’ve driven to Chicago and photographed the Chicago Botanic Gardens, drove home to briefly photograph fall in Colorado, drove east to photograph Acadia with a quick stop in Vermont, drove home and left two days later for Zion National Park where we spent three weeks in the trailer and a few nights in our tent. All of this while working (me as a full time software developer, and Sarah by teaching at many of the places we were visiting). By the end, actually well before the end, we were exhausted!
I would much rather have this level of intensity where I spend multiple weeks in a location rather than the weekend warrior style of being at a place for 3 days and not getting a chance to explore it deeply. There is probably a healthier balance out there - one that continues to remains elusive though almost certainly involves less driving.
All of that is a long winded way of saying I have a bunch of new photos from Colorado, Vermont, Acadia, and Zion (over 150, I know…), and because it’s the end of the year, a gallery of my 50-ish favorites from 2021, all linked below.
Read MoreSarah and I were fortunate to spend almost three weeks in February in one of our favorite places, Death Valley National Park. Like our other two pandemic trips, we packed the trailer to the brim and avoided the need for having to go to a grocery store or laundromat for the entire trip. We focused mostly on canyons (new and old) but explored a few other new areas of the park and also returned to a few favorite locations. A few of my favorite photos are below, but you may wish to view the entire gallery.
This was my first extensive trip with my new camera, a Canon EOS R5 and also the Canon RF 100-500 lens - both of which are amazing. In addition to the extra 100mm reach over my previous 100-400mm lens, the close focusing distance makes the 100-500mm a pseudo-macro lens and opens up a lot of creative possibilities.
Also, as you may have noticed, our website, photo galleries, and online store (along with a new logo) are now at https://smallscenes.com and no longer Nature Photo Guides (though the old links will still work). We felt a change was needed, and Small Scenes, in addition to being easier to remember, shorter, and more unique, also better represents our photography and philosophy.
Read MoreLike many others we have severely limited our travel during the pandemic. All of this time at home meant I no longer had an excuse for avoiding a large looming project that has been taunting me for many years: processing my entire photo backlog. I am happy to say that project is now complete!
The full gallery of all my new or newly processed work, over 300 photographs, can be viewed here. If you don’t feel like spending an hour looking at 300 photos, you can save some time and just look at my favorites from this project. The photographs are all organized into their respective galleries as well.
In addition there are several new galleries that I created as part of this project: Plants - Black and White, Northern Rockies, Kauai, Panoramas, and Wildlife. My Eastern US and Pacific Northwest galleries were also greatly expanded.
About 80% of the photos are new, and the rest are re-processed versions of photos that I didn’t like the original processing on or photos I never added to our website for whatever reason. I have been doing a good job of keeping up with my backlog for the last few years, but I never spent time going through these (mostly) older photographs until now (the oldest photos are from 2007, the most recent from 2020).
What follows is a selection of some of my favorites from this project, but see the links above for the complete set.
Read MoreSarah and I recently returned from a trip to Zion National Park. With our self-contained trailer it is remarkably easy to stay away from people, which we managed to do for the entire trip, our only visits up the main canyon were on bike. Prior to Zion we photographed fall colors here and there around our home in southwest Colorado. Here’s a selection of my photographs from that period, you can see the full gallery here, which includes over forty new photographs.
Read MoreSarah and I recently returned from Yellowstone National Park, our first extended photography trip since the pandemic began earlier this year. Apparently the rest of the United States also felt it was a good time to visit the park, but despite the crowds (which we could escape easily by getting up earlier or hiking on less popular trails) we had a great time. We were treated to a variety of conditions including an early season snowfall, foggy chilly mornings, and the onset of fall colors. It felt great to be outside photographing again.
Here is a selection of my photos from the trip, you may wish to see the complete gallery which includes over fifty new photographs.
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