by Michael Frye | Oct 6, 2019 | Travels and Stories
Sunbeams, mountains, and autumn maples, Utah. We were treated to some spectacular sunbeams one morning. Despite the high contrast, I was able to get detail in highlights and shadows with just one exposure. 50mm, 1/250th sec. at f/11, ISO 100, polarizer.
Claudia and I were driving to Colorado when we decided to take a little detour to the Wasatch Mountains in Utah. We’d never been there, and it looked like the bigtooth maples were nearing their peak color, so why not?
The maples, as it turned out, were spectacular, covering the hillsides with red. I’d never seen anything like it. And one day we got treated to some interesting weather, with clouds, mist, and sunbeams.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 15, 2019 | Smartphone Photography
I.O.O.F. Hall, Bodie SHP, California. I love to photograph the light streaming through the windows of the curtain-less, abandoned interiors of Bodie.
Bodie is such a fun place to photograph. I had a chance to go back to Bodie at night in early August, and then at the end of August we were able to get inside some of the normally-inaccessible interiors during our good friend Robert Eckhardt’s iPhone-photography workshop.
Smartphone cameras keep getting better and better. This time I was using an iPhone XR, which performs much better in low light than my previous iPhone. And I mostly used raw mode to get the best image quality and the most flexibility in processing the images.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 8, 2019 | Light and Weather
Half Dome and Nevada Fall at sunset from Glacier Point, Yosemite
While summer is the dry season in California, monsoonal moisture often pushes up from Mexico during this season, triggering afternoon thunderstorms in the mountains. But there hasn’t been much of that this year. It’s been one sunny day after another. While the typical late-summer monsoons made their way to Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado, they never reached this far west.
Last week, however, some of that monsoonal moisture finally arrived in the Sierra, and on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, clouds and thunderstorms developed over the high country.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 18, 2019 | Light and Weather
Creek flowing into the Pacific Ocean, Oregon coast. 26mm, five bracketed exposures at f/16, ISO 100, blended with Lightroom’s HDR Merge, then blended back with one of the original images in Photoshop to eliminate ghosting.
Summer is fog season along the west coast. Currents and upwelling bring cool water to the surface near the shore, and when warm, moist air blowing off the Pacific encounters that cold water the air temperature near the surface drops to meet the dew point, creating the right conditions for fog formation.
Usually that fog layer lifts above sea level, so along the shore it looks like a low overcast. That stratus deck might break up late in the morning, but often starts to re-form toward sunset, building back into a solid overcast by morning.
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by Michael Frye | Aug 14, 2019 | Announcements
Sunset over Yosemite Valley with Cathedral Rocks, El Capitan, and Horsetail Fall, Yosemite
This is a friendly reminder that my print prices will be increasing on August 18th – just four days from now!
My matted, signed, limited-edition 16×20 prints will increase from $325 to $450. 20x24s will go from $475 up to $650, 24x30s from $750 to $975, and 30x40s from $1100 to $1350.
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