by Michael Frye | Nov 13, 2022 | Travels and Stories
Sunrise at a glacial lake, New Zealand. It was a treat to photograph this glacial lake, complete with icebergs – something I don’t get to do in California! And with fresh snow to boot.
New Zealand’s South Island is remarkably diverse. It’s an area about the size of Colorado, yet contains temperate rain forests, dry grasslands, enormous natural lakes, and lots of beautiful coastline, including its renowned fiords.
And to top if off (literally), there’s also a range of high, snowy mountains – the Southern Alps. These mountains aren’t terribly high compared to some other ranges. The tallest peak, Aoraki / Mt. Cook, is “only” 12,218 feet (3,724 meters) above sea level. Compare that to Mt. Whitney, in my home mountains, the Sierra Nevada, at 14,505 feet (4,421 meters) – the tallest peak in the contiguous United States (the “lower 48”).
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by Michael Frye | Oct 19, 2022 | Travels and Stories
Aoraki/Mt. Cook at sunrise, New Zealand. This is the highest mountain in New Zealand. It’s covered in snow and ice year-round, but an antarctic cold front gave even the lower mountains a fresh coat of snow. I took this photo a good 40 minutes before sunrise as the predawn glow turned the mountains and clouds a vivid shade of pink.
I’m in the deep south. So far south that I’m down under – on New Zealand’s South Island.
Things can be disorienting here. I’m sure everything seems perfectly normal to New Zealanders, or to anyone who lives in the Southern Hemisphere, but to Northern Hemisphere residents like me everything is a bit upside down.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 22, 2022 | Light and Weather, Vision and Creativity
Layers of fog, Yellowstone NP, Wyoming. Early one morning I climbed a low hill, trying to gain some elevation so I could look down on the fog. After sunrise I noticed beautiful sidelight raking across this scene of a meandering river, so I raced along the hilltop to get a better view and composed this image. I like the horizontal layers of light and dark, punctuated by the vertical, curving column of steam that added a necessary visual focal point. 160mm, 1/20 sec. at f/16, ISO 100.
As I said in my last post, I love photographing fog and mist, so here are more misty images from our trip to Yellowstone. I explain my approach to photographing these scenes in that previous post, but the captions here contain more detail about the specific photos shown.
— Michael Frye
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by Michael Frye | Sep 20, 2022 | Light and Weather, Vision and Creativity
Sun rising through fog and steam, Yellowstone NP, Wyoming. Standing on a low hill, I moved to position the sun behind the column of steam, in order to avoid lens flare and prevent the sun itself from being completely blown out. With this extreme constrast I bracketed five frames, two stops apart, and blended the exposures with Lightroom’s HDR Merge. 100mm, bracketed shutter speeds, f/11, ISO 100.
If you read this blog regularly you know that I love fog and mist. And few places generate fog and mist as consistently as the thermal areas of Yellowstone during cold weather. Warm, moist air rising from the geysers and hot springs into the colder surrounding atmosphere creates a perfect recipe for mist formation.
During the first part of our stay in Yellowstone the daytime highs were in the low to mid 80s. But the daily temperature fluctuations were tremendous, so the next morning the thermal areas would be near freezing – a difference of around 50 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 28 degrees Celsius). So despite unusually warm days for early September, we still found plenty of steam and fog in the mornings. And toward the end of our stay a cold front came through, temps dropped, and we saw even more mist.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 7, 2022 | Night Photography, Travels and Stories
Aurora borealis reflected in a thermal pool, Yellowstone NP, Wyoming. 20mm, 10 seconds at f/1.8, ISO 6400. I would typically use a little longer shutter speed for night photos like this, but the aurora was moving and changing quite quickly, so a longer exposure would have caused the pillars to blur and smear together.
Claudia and I are back in Yellowstone. We had such a great time here last year we had to return.
And we’re glad we did. We’ve experienced many memorable moments so far, but the clear highlight was seeing and photographing the aurora borealis (aka Northern Lights) early Sunday morning.
We surely wouldn’t have done this if it weren’t for our friends David Kingham and Jennifer Renwick. Jennifer and David are both wonderful photographers, and know Yellowstone inside out. Before Claudia and I arrived in Yellowstone they saw and photographed an aurora one night. It wasn’t the most intense aurora, but it was something.
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