Wildlife Photography
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 | 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 | Mar 18, 2025 | Travels and Stories, Wildlife Photography
Mountains, glaciers, and chinstrap penguins, Antarctica
At the end of our trip to Antarctica for Visionary Wild, I told Claudia that the thing I was going to miss most was seeing penguins every day. It seemed strange to be heading back to a world without penguins, since they had been a daily part of our lives for two weeks.
And penguins are so much fun to watch. While supremely graceful in water, they’re awkward on land. Yet every day many penguins climb and descend from their nests on slopes so steep they would intimidate most humans. They fall all the time, but always seem to bounce back up and keep going. They’re determined and dedicated parents; they have to be to thrive and reproduce in this harsh environment. And they’re feisty. They won’t tolerate other penguins getting too close to their nest, or intruding on their space.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 7, 2024 | Travels and Stories, Wildlife Photography
Grizzly 399 and her 18-month-old cub, Grand Teton NP, Wyoming
As I mentioned in my last post, Claudia and I had a great time watching and photographing the wildlife in the Tetons, and during a brief visit to Yellowstone. There’s so much wildlife in these parks, and the animals are relatively easy to see.
For us, the highlight was seeing the famous Grizzly 399 with her yearling cub, and Grizzly 1063 with her triplet cubs of the year – experiences we shared with our friends Charlotte Gibb and Chrissy Donadi, which made it even more fun.
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by Michael Frye | Oct 31, 2021 | Travels and Stories, Wildlife Photography
Misty sunrise, Yellowstone
I usually talk about photography as an art form – a way to express yourself and your vision, and to communicate with others through this wonderful medium.
But photographs also have an amazing ability to evoke memories. Sometimes a well-executed image made by someone else will resonate with us because it stirs a memory of a past event in our lives.
Naturally though, photographs from our own lives can be even more powerful in evoking memories from our past. Most of us have had the experience of looking through old family photos, and suddenly having a vivid recollection of an event we hadn’t thought about in years. It doesn’t matter if the images themselves are mediocre; they still have tremendous power to stir recollections.
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by Michael Frye | Mar 9, 2021 | Wildlife Photography
Sandhill cranes at sunrise, San Joaquin Valley, California
During this past winter Claudia and I spent a lot of time in California’s Central Valley. This area isn’t known for its scenic beauty, but we found a lot of beauty there.
This was once a vast region of seasonal wetlands and flower-filled prairies, teeming with waterfowl, elk, pronghorn antelope, wolves, grizzly bears, and endless acres of springtime flowers. It’s estimated that 500,000 tule elk once roamed this region, and early visitors described flocks of wintering geese so large and dense they darkened the midday sky. This “American Serengeti” existed less than 200 years ago, in an area now occupied by farmlands, towns, and cities.
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