Travels and Stories
by Michael Frye | Feb 2, 2025 | Travels and Stories
Chinstrap penguin calling, Antarctica. On our first zodiac excursion we encountered these two chinstraps posing for us on an iceberg in a snowstorm.
Claudia and I just returned home from Antarctica. What a wonderful trip! It’s hard to believe that this place actually exists here on earth, because it seems so different than everywhere else on the planet. It’s other-worldly, yet strikingly beautiful.
I made a lot of photos on this trip – over 35,000! Some of that was wildlife photography, which demands capturing many frames to catch the right pose or moment of action. And most of the landscape photos were also hand-held from a moving ship or zodiac, where I had to capture a series of frames to ensure catching the right angle as we passed one compelling scene after another. But the biggest problem was that the place is just so damned beautiful that there were photos everywhere I looked!
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by Michael Frye | Jan 24, 2025 | Travels and Stories
Fog, ice, and mountains, Antarctica
Claudia and I are having a wonderful time in Antarctica. It’s just an amazing, other-worldly place. And we’ve had great conditions, with unusually calm winds, and some beautiful light and weather.
I’m co-leading this trip for Visionary Wild with Chris Linder, who’s a super-nice guy, and a wonderful photographer and teacher. Our crew aboard the Hans Hansson has been great, getting us into lots of beautiful spots that bigger ships can’t get into, and happily making diversions to circle an interesting iceberg, or check out an ice arch, or get us into the right spots to take advantage of the light. And we have a wonderful group of participants, which always makes it more fun. It’s a small group – only nine participants – and we’re all having a great time together.
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by Michael Frye | Nov 17, 2024 | Light and Weather, Travels and Stories
Crashing wave on a foggy morning, Oregon Coast
We just finished another edition of our Oregon Coast workshop, and once again had a great time. We had a really nice group of people, which always makes it more fun for everyone. And we encountered some wonderfully stormy weather.
The forecasts for the workshop showed a series of storms, and rain every day. But that didn’t mean nonstop rain. I knew there would be breaks, and those breaks could generate some interesting light.
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by Michael Frye | Nov 7, 2024 | Light and Weather, Travels and Stories
Fog and Negit Island, sunrise, Mono Lake, California
On our way home from Montana last month, Claudia and I stopped for the night in Lee Vining (near Mono Lake, just east of Yosemite). We met our friends Charlotte and Gary Gibb there, and had dinner with them at the Whoa Nellie Deli.
It was raining – the first significant weather we’d encountered on our whole trip. Then, just before sunset, the rain stopped, and we saw signs of clearing, so we rushed out to the shore of Mono Lake to catch the sunset. While we didn’t see the sun breaking through, we caught a nice sunset glow over the lake:
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by Michael Frye | Oct 20, 2024 | Night Photography, Travels and Stories
Aurora reflected in Swiftcurrent Lake, Glacier NP, Montana. The aurora was dancing and shimmering at an incredible rate of speed when I made this photo. This is a stitched panorama; four frames, with the camera and 20mm lens turned vertically, blended with Lightroom’s Panorama Merge, and then run through Lightroom’s Denoise. I wasn’t sure if stitched panoramas would work with the aurora moving so quickly, but luckily they did (most of the time). Each frame was 1 second at f/1.8, ISO 6400.
In late September Claudia and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Millpond Music Festival in Bishop, California. Then we drove to Kanab, Utah, for the Nightscaper conference – which turned out to be a super fun event. Kudos to the National Parks at Night team (Lance Keimig, Chris Nicholson, Tim Cooper, Gabriel Biderman, and Matt Hill) for making everything run so smoothly!
After the conference, we planned to just go wherever things looked interesting. We decided to head to southwest Colorado to look for fall color. But as soon as we arrived I started getting alerts about increased solar activity, and the possibility of seeing auroras at mid latitudes.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 15, 2024 | Travels and Stories, Vision and Creativity
Sand clouds, White Sands NP, New Mexico
Back in April, on our way to view the solar eclipse in Arkansas, Claudia and I stopped to photograph sand dunes in southern California and New Mexico.
The difference between those two locations was striking. The California dunes were in a remote corner of the Mojave Desert, and we saw only a few other people there. Footprints were scarce. White Sands National Park in New Mexico was teeming with visitors, including many people sliding down steep-sided dunes with snow-sliding devices. While it was nice to see people enjoying the dunes, you had to hike quite a distance to photograph footprint-free sand.
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