Wildlife Photography
by Michael Frye | Feb 8, 2026 | Travels and Stories, Wildlife Photography
Porpoising chinstrap penguins, Antarctica. 355mm, 1/1500 sec at f/16, ISO 5000. I needed a fast shutter speed to freeze motion, and a small aperture to get all the penguins in focus. That required pushing the ISO quite high, but I can deal with the noise (Adobe’s Denoise did a great job), while I can’t fix a blurry photo.
Penguins are so much fun to watch. I need penguins in my life every day. I think everyone does. Luckily I can watch Claudia’s videos whenever I need a penguin fix.
It’s super fun watching penguins at their nests, with the adults performing displays and calls, stealing rocks from neighboring nests, and feeding their adorable chicks. But it’s also highly entertaining to watch them away from their nests – especially as they’re porpoising out of the water, jumping ashore, or leaping into the water en masse.
Penguins are fast and agile swimmers. Gentoo penguins are thought to be the fastest swimmers, reaching speeds of up to 22 mph. (This video shows how fast and agile they are underwater.)
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by Michael Frye | Feb 1, 2026 | Travels and Stories, Wildlife Photography
Southern giant petrel chasing a chinstrap penguin, Antarctica (it didn’t catch it)
On one of our zodiac cruises in Antarctica we visited a large chinstrap penguin colony, where penguins gathered on a black-sand beach as they were coming and going. We couldn’t land on this beach due to rough surf and high penguin activity, but our zodiac drivers hovered just offshore, giving us a great view.
The penguins attracted southern giant petrels. As you can see from the accompanying photos and video, giant petrels are big birds – larger than the chinstraps – with a six- to seven-foot wingspan. Petrels are quite aggressive, and will sometimes hunt penguins. They usually can’t catch a healthy adult penguin, but can catch chicks, or a sick or injured adult.
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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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