Announcements
by Michael Frye | Dec 24, 2025 | Announcements, Wildlife Photography
Tundra swans in fog, Sacramento Valley, California
Claudia and I feel lucky to have experienced many special moments this past year, including two mornings in the Sacramento Valley last month photographing tundra swans in the fog. I posted one of the swan images yesterday with my best-of-year nominees, but here are a few more. I had long wanted to photograph swans in fog – white on white, with elegant white birds against a white backdrop. It was wonderful to finally get that opportunity.
I hope these photographs feel peaceful. In reality, swans are often squabbling with each other. After every altercation, however, they flap their wings, shrug it off, and swim away, wrapped in serenity once again. They’re focused on the present, not the past, and the squabble is forgotten. That seems like a good lesson for us.
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by Michael Frye | Dec 23, 2025 | Announcements
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
Once again I’m inviting you, my faithful blog readers, to help me choose my best photographs from the past year. I’ve posted 52 of my favorite images from 2025 below, in chronological order. After you look through these, please use the form at the bottom of this post to list your ten favorites. The voting deadline is midnight Pacific Time, Monday, December 29th. Once the votes are in I’ll post the top ten or twelve on this blog.
As always, I reserve the right to override the votes if one of my favorites gets panned. But I’ve rarely had to exercise this power because my readers have excellent taste. 🙂
Thanks for your input — I appreciate your help!
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by Michael Frye | Dec 19, 2025 | Announcements
A Landscape Photography Webinar
Moon rising above Half Dome from Tunnel View, Yosemite NP, California
Learn how to use simple, powerful tools to plan photos of the sun, moon, Milky Way, or any celestial object
We have powerful tools for photo planning at our fingertips – apps that allow us to predict where the sun or moon might rise or set in relation to the landscape, how the light will look at a given time and place, the position of the Milky Way above the land, and much more.
Unfortunately, many of these tools are excessively complicated, unintuitive, and difficult to learn. I know many photographers who have thrown up their hands and given up when faced with the dense complexity of these apps.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this new webinar I’ll show you how I use a few simple tools to precisely visualize the position of the sun, moon, Milky Way (or any celestial object) in relation to the landscape, and see how the light will change for any scene. We’ll delve into apps like PhotoPills, The Photographer’s Ephemeris, The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D, and Planit Pro – but we’ll stick to the things you need to know, bypassing the extraneous stuff that only gets in the way.
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by Michael Frye | Nov 27, 2025 | Announcements
Backlit aspens, Utah
It’s Thanksgiving Day here in the United States – a good time to pause and think about all the things we have to be grateful for.
I’m very thankful for my family and friends. I’m grateful that our son is married and settled and happy. I’m so lucky to have been married to the same wonderful woman for 39 years – the best partner I could possibly have for all of life’s adventures.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to see and photograph so many beautiful places. This year Claudia and I traveled to Antarctica, Japan, Greenland, the Smokies, and all over the western U.S. What an incredible planet we live on!
And I’m always very grateful for the support I receive from you, my faithful blog readers. Your comments and emails help make writing this blog fun, and keep me motivated and inspired. Thank you!
Whether or not you celebrate Thanksgiving (or live in a country that celebrates it on a different day), I hope you all have a lot to be thankful for!
— Michael Frye
by Michael Frye | Nov 7, 2025 | Announcements
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be an instructor at the Out of Merritt Island Bird Photography Conference in March!
I’ll be joined by a stellar lineup of fellow instructors, including Ray Hennessy, Mary Anne Karren, Isaac Grant, Nick Page, David Akoubian, Alyce Bender, and Chrissy Donadi (12 instructors in all). The conference will be based in Cocoa Beach, close to some of Florida’s best bird-photography locations like Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, Canaveral National Seashore, Orlando Wetlands, and Sebastian Inlet. And we’ll get to photograph some of Florida’s abundant, unique, and accessible bird species, including Roseate Spoonbills, Tri-colored Herons, Glossy Ibises, Anhingas, Purple Gallinules, Limpkins, Ospreys, Snail Kites, Wood Storks, Reddish Egrets, Scrub Jays, Magnificent Frigatebirds, Black Skimmers, Black-necked Stilts, and Crested Caracaras.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 11, 2025 | Announcements, Digital Darkroom
Make Your Workflow Faster and More Efficient By Mastering Lightroom’s Powerful Retouching Tools
Retouching can be a tedious chore. Even removing simple dust spots can be time-consuming, and more complex tasks take even longer. So the last thing you want is to do it over again! But unfortunately that’s always a possibility when you do retouching in Photoshop, even if you do it on a separate layer. What if you need to go back and modify the original raw file settings in Lightroom? Or what if Adobe adds a new feature for Lightroom (like a fantastic new Denoise tool) that you want to take advantage of? Now your cloning layer won’t match the new raw-file settings, and you’ll have to do the retouching over again.
But if you do the retouching in Lightroom you’ll NEVER have to do it again, because the retouching will always adapt seamlessly to any changes you make to the raw file – plus you can simplify your workflow by avoiding the roundtrip to Photoshop and back. This Lightroom-only workflow has become much easier in recent years as Adobe has added powerful new retouching tools to Lightroom, making it possible to do even complex jobs with relative ease. Because of Lightroom’s power and flexibility, I never do retouching in Photoshop anymore if I can possibly help it.
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