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30 minutes of amazing transformation is all it took to change a drab gray stormy view of  Yosemite’s Half Dome and Nevada Falls into a dynamic fiery rainbow filled  scene. Literally in the 11th hour after a full day of foggy and overcast weather I witnessed a sunset like I’ve never seen anywhere in all my travels. As if scripted, storm clouds rose above Yosemite Valley and were illuminated by a thin pipe

A visit to the Monterey coastline just south of San Francisco, California never fails to inspire. Recently I decided to use this location to test some camera bodies (Hasselblad H5D, Nikon D800 and Canon 5D Mark III) and squeezed in a little extra time to try out a new Singh-Ray Mor-Slo 10-stop filter.  While I didn’t have time to stack filters and experiment further I was very happy with the outcome. Gear aside

This weekend I went out with some new gear to test, namely the Hasselblad H5D medium format DSLR and Hasselblad 300mm f/4.5 lens via BorrowLenses.com. The location of choice was Asilomar State Beach. The H5D has roughly twice the resolution as my Canon 5D Mark II with a whopping 40 megapixels per image.  I had been curious to find out if Hasselblad’s reputation was hype or not. To cut to the chase I’ll te

Much is said about light in landscape photography, especially golden hour, blue hour and moonlight. While most associate these lighting conditions with the end of the day it’s important to note they happen at the beginning of the day too and not just sourced from the sun. It’s a little bit rarer to see, as fewer photographers actually want to stay up or wake up to see golden moonlight. Case and point was

Yosemite Sunrise I was revisiting some old film scans from several years ago thanks to a client request and rediscovered this photo. Slide film isn’t very forgiving in regard to dynamic range, but I always liked the contrasty nature of this photo. It was taken on a cold snowy winter morning well before sunrise. Taking a long exposure allowed for the faint color in the sky to register quite strongly which I alwa

When you first enter Yosemite National Park it is impossible to miss El Capitan. Towering some 3,000 feet above the valley floor with a peak elevation of 7,573 feet its a feast for the eyes and an attractive challenge for several hardy rock climbers. The more I visit Yosemite the more I see visitors accept the walls of the valley as an unmoving constant, but if you stop to really watch the valley walls you’ll n

Photography is about a lot of things and other than “light” I’d say the “journey” is the most important. The fantastic thing about photography is that one’s mastery of the medium & artistic vision is a journey as much as the quest for each photo. Just as you never know what is over the next hill to photograph you never know how your view of the world might evolve. In both regar

One of the more intriguing visual phenomenon is seeing a giant moon on the horizon. One might think that there is some physical explanation as to why the moon is larger when low on the horizon, but its actually a visual illusion where your brain is playing a trick on you. This illusion is aptly called the “Moon Illusion“. This illusion is incredibly well explained in the following video: So how do people