Travels and Stories
by Michael Frye | Oct 30, 2025 | Light and Weather, Travels and Stories
Dappled light at a canyon overlook, Utah
Claudia and I are finally on our way home after our long road trip. It’s been a fantastic journey, and we really don’t want it to end, but we’ll be back on the road again soon, heading to the Oregon Coast. That’s one of my favorite places to photograph, so I’m looking forward to that already.
I’ve made lots of new images on this trip that I’m excited about. It’ll take some time to sort through and process them all, but here are a few photos from one stormy day in Utah.
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by Michael Frye | Oct 19, 2025 | Travels and Stories
Clouds, mist, and aspens, Colorado
After returning from Greenland, Claudia and I spent only a few days at home before starting a road trip to Utah and Colorado. We began by photographing autumn aspens and maples in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, then moved to western Colorado for more aspens. Now we’re back in Utah, but in the southern part, with red-rock deserts and yellow cottonwood trees. We’re having a great time.
I’ve been making lots of photographs, so it’s hard to keep up with the backlog of images, but here are a couple of my favorites from the trip so far. These are from southwest Colorado, with mist and clouds created by the remnants of Hurricane Priscilla as it moved through the area and dumped large quantities of rain.
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by Michael Frye | Oct 5, 2025 | Travels and Stories, Wildlife Photography
Arctic fox, Scoresby Sund, Greenland
Scoresby Sund, the area of east Greenland we visited on our Visionary Wild trip last month, is spectacularly beautiful. But I didn’t expect to see much wildlife there, because this region is actively hunted by the local Inuit people.
So I was pleasantly surprised by how much wildlife we actually saw, including musk oxen, Arctic hares, Arctic foxes, and polar bears.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 25, 2025 | Travels and Stories
Pond, peaks, fiord, and glacier at sunrise, Scoresby Sund, Greenland
Claudia and I just got back from our trip to Greenland with Visionary Wild… and it was fantastic. This is such a beautiful part of the world, and we got to experience it with a wonderful group of people – our 16 lively and friendly participants, our fantastic ship’s crew, and my amazing co-instructors, Jerry Dodrill and Chris Linder.
Our Greenland expedition focused on Scoresby Sund, on the east coast. While the interior of Greenland is covered by the Greenland Ice Sheet, the second-largest body of ice on Earth (after the Antarctic Ice Sheet), Scoresby Sund is a land of sharp peaks and rocky fiords, with glaciers carving through the mountains and depositing icebergs into the sea. Scoresby Sund is considered the largest fiord system in the world, with many long, narrow channels, and mountains rising dramatically from the water to over 6,000 feet above sea level.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 6, 2025 | Travels and Stories
Mountains and glaciers, Antarctica
As we dive into the heat of summer, my thoughts sometimes return to the icy world of Antarctica.
People think of Antarctica as a super-cold place. But we were there in late January, which is the middle of summer down there. Most of the sea ice had melted, so there was plenty of open water, which moderated the air, and kept temperatures right around the freezing point. Not exactly balmy, but quite tolerable. I’ll take that over the summer heat here in Mariposa, where temperatures sometimes reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Of course the ice-free seas and mild temperatures don’t last long in Antarctica. In March, as the days get shorter, and temperatures drop, the sea ice starts to re-form. At Vernadsky, a Ukrainian research station on the Antarctic Peninsula that we visited during our January trip, scientists who spend the winter there have to be completely self-sufficient for six months. Ships can’t reach them because of the pack ice, and there’s no airstrip.
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by Michael Frye | May 26, 2025 | Travels and Stories, Vision and Creativity
Clouds, sunbeams, and mountains, Antarctica. One of the things that surprised me about Antarctica was how bright it was. I expected some dramatic, even gloomy weather – and we got a little of that. But the days were long; it never got completely dark. And all that ice, snow, and water reflected lots of light, making everything luminous. So some of my favorite landscape images of Antarctica capture a bit of the drama of that incredible place, but also show some of the luminosity.
There’s value in photographing familiar places. Whether it’s somewhere near home, or a spot you visit repeatedly, the better you know an area, the better you’ll be able to know where to go under different conditions. And maybe more importantly, you can forge a deeper connection with that place, and that tends to manifest itself in your photographs.
On the other hand, it’s exciting to travel to new, unfamiliar destinations. We only have so much time on this earth, and most of us would like to see as much of this planet as we can while we’re here – if we have the opportunity to do so.
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