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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sandhill crane takeoff, San Joaquin Valley, California. 327mm, 1/500 sec. at f/5.6, ISO 2000.
Every year Claudia and I photograph migratory birds wintering in California’s Central Valley. It’s a world of constant motion, with groups of birds taking off, landing, moving from fields to ponds (and back), skimming over marshes, or probing the water for food.
It’s that motion that we find so captivating, and it’s that motion that’s so challenging to photograph. It takes lots of practice to learn how to follow birds in flight, keep them in focus, adjust exposures on the fly, zoom in and out as needed, and make instant decisions about composition.
I’ve been using Lightroom since Adobe released the beta version in 2006. Over the years I’ve learned many shortcuts, and in this video I share some of my favorite tips – things I use all the time to streamline my workflow:
