In the Moment:
Michael Frye's Landscape Photography Blog
by Michael Frye | Jul 27, 2025 | Advanced Techniques, Vision and Creativity
Sea stack and swirling waves, Northern California coast. 55mm, 3 seconds at f/16, ISO 200, ND filter. Timing was vitally important in making this photograph. I made 92 exposures with this exact same composition and camera settings, but only one had this zigzag wave.
Back in early June, before, during, and after our redwoods workshop in Northern California, we had many days with low fog along the coast. That’s somewhat unusual up there. It’s more typical to see the fog layer rise up a bit, where it looks like a low overcast at sea level, but if you can climb higher you might be able to get into the clouds, and into the fog.
That higher stratus deck usually works better for finding fog in redwood groves, since redwoods don’t grow at low elevations near the shore (there’s too much salt spray for them). But I love photographing low fog along the coast, with sea stacks and rock outcrops looming out of the mist. Fog is so common in these coastal areas that photographing these scenes in fog actually seems more characteristic, more typical, than photographing them on a sunny day, or even with a great sunset. I think of these shores as brooding and mysterious, so I like working with weather that enhances that mood.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 20, 2025 | Light and Weather
Mule deer doe and backlit wildflowers, Yosemite NP, California. 262mm, 1/500 sec. at f/16, ISO 1600.
It’s midsummer, which motivates Claudia and me to seek cooler and less-crowded spots in the Yosemite high country. And there are usually many flowers at those higher elevations this time of year, which gives us another incentive to go up there.
We spent a couple of afternoons recently in some colorful meadows. I loved the way the sunlight filtered through the trees next to these meadows, creating bands of light and dark through patches of flowers.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 13, 2025 | Night Photography
Star trails above a lodgepole pine, Yosemite NP, CA, USA
I think star-trail images have been somewhat neglected in recent years. Most night photographers today concentrate on capturing pinpoint stars and the Milky Way. The Milky Way is certainly beautiful, and modern digital sensors allow virtually anyone to capture the Milky Way without specialized equipment. Even phone cameras can do it. So all that is understandable.
With film you needed a star-tracker to capture the Milky Way, and it was virtually impossible to combine that Milky Way image with a stationary landscape in the foreground. But it was easy to capture star trails by just putting the camera on a tripod and leaving the shutter open for a long time. So star-trail photos became common long before Milky Way images filled up our Instagram feeds.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 11, 2025 | Announcements
Make Your Workflow Faster and More Efficient By Mastering Lightroom’s Powerful Retouching Tools
Retouching can be a tedious chore. Even removing simple dust spots can be time-consuming, and more complex tasks take even longer. So the last thing you want is to do it over again! But unfortunately that’s always a possibility when you do retouching in Photoshop, even if you do it on a separate layer. What if you need to go back and modify the original raw file settings in Lightroom? Or what if Adobe adds a new feature for Lightroom (like a fantastic new Denoise tool) that you want to take advantage of? Now your cloning layer won’t match the new raw-file settings, and you’ll have to do the retouching over again.
But if you do the retouching in Lightroom you’ll NEVER have to do it again, because the retouching will always adapt seamlessly to any changes you make to the raw file – plus you can simplify your workflow by avoiding the roundtrip to Photoshop and back. This Lightroom-only workflow has become much easier in recent years as Adobe has added powerful new retouching tools to Lightroom, making it possible to do even complex jobs with relative ease. Because of Lightroom’s power and flexibility, I never do retouching in Photoshop anymore if I can possibly help it.
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by Michael Frye | Jul 6, 2025 | Travels and Stories
Mountains and glaciers, Antarctica
As we dive into the heat of summer, my thoughts sometimes return to the icy world of Antarctica.
People think of Antarctica as a super-cold place. But we were there in late January, which is the middle of summer down there. Most of the sea ice had melted, so there was plenty of open water, which moderated the air, and kept temperatures right around the freezing point. Not exactly balmy, but quite tolerable. I’ll take that over the summer heat here in Mariposa, where temperatures sometimes reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Of course the ice-free seas and mild temperatures don’t last long in Antarctica. In March, as the days get shorter, and temperatures drop, the sea ice starts to re-form. At Vernadsky, a Ukrainian research station on the Antarctic Peninsula that we visited during our January trip, scientists who spend the winter there have to be completely self-sufficient for six months. Ships can’t reach them because of the pack ice, and there’s no airstrip.
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by Michael Frye | Jun 29, 2025 | Light and Weather
Cascade and spring reflections, Great Smoky Mountains NP, Tennessee. I loved the repeating patterns created by the standing waves in this cascade, coupled with the vivid green reflections. 52mm, 1/3 sec. at f/16, ISO 100.
You can find every shade of green in the Smokies in spring – light green, dark green, blue-green, yellow-green, and everything in between. Occasionally the greens are mixed with a splash of blue sky or white water, but it’s a green world.
Our eyes and brains can distinguish more shades of green than any other color. The cones in our retinas, which perceive color, are more sensitive to green wavelengths than other colors – not surprising for a species that evolved in African forests, where distinguishing between shades of green helped find food and avoid predators.
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by Michael Frye | Jun 28, 2025 | Announcements
The Teton Range from Jackson Lake at sunrise, Grand Teton NP, Wyoming
I’m excited to be going back to Wyoming for another Out of Grand Teton photo conference in autumn of 2026!
I was an instructor for the first Out of Grand Teton conference last June, and it was so much fun. The Tetons are known for their spectacular mountain landscapes, and rightfully so – the scenery is amazing. But it’s also a wonderful place to photograph wildlife and intimate scenes. I think everyone in the conference enjoyed photographing all of it; I certainly did! We captured some memorable sunrises and sunsets, photographed beautiful flowers, trees, and ponds, and had memorable wildlife encounters with moose, bears, otters, a fox, and a host of other animals.
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by Michael Frye | Jun 15, 2025 | Light and Weather, Vision and Creativity
Sunlight, fog, and redwoods, Northern California
Claudia and I recently returned from two weeks in the far northwest corner of California among the redwoods. And we loved it there, as always. It’s one of my favorite places on the planet.
I love forests in general, including the hardwood forests in the eastern U.S., the conifer forests of Yosemite, aspens in the western mountains, and the moss-draped, old-growth forests of the Olympic Peninsula. They’re all great.
But the redwoods are extra-special to me. Among these giant trees, I feel like I’ve been transported back in time. It’s easy to imagine dinosaurs roaming forests like these – because they did. During the Cretaceous period, the height of the dinosaur’s reign, some 145 to 66 million years ago, ancestors of redwoods were abundant, covering large tracts of the northern and southern hemispheres. If redwood forests seem ancient and primeval to me, it’s because they really are ancient. That earthy smell of redwoods and ferns I notice when I enter a redwood forest was probably familiar to many dinosaurs.
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by Michael Frye | May 26, 2025 | Travels and Stories, Vision and Creativity
Clouds, sunbeams, and mountains, Antarctica. One of the things that surprised me about Antarctica was how bright it was. I expected some dramatic, even gloomy weather – and we got a little of that. But the days were long; it never got completely dark. And all that ice, snow, and water reflected lots of light, making everything luminous. So some of my favorite landscape images of Antarctica capture a bit of the drama of that incredible place, but also show some of the luminosity.
There’s value in photographing familiar places. Whether it’s somewhere near home, or a spot you visit repeatedly, the better you know an area, the better you’ll be able to know where to go under different conditions. And maybe more importantly, you can forge a deeper connection with that place, and that tends to manifest itself in your photographs.
On the other hand, it’s exciting to travel to new, unfamiliar destinations. We only have so much time on this earth, and most of us would like to see as much of this planet as we can while we’re here – if we have the opportunity to do so.
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by Michael Frye | May 9, 2025 | Travels and Stories, Vision and Creativity
Dogwood and mist at sunset, Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina. This isn’t a photograph I expected to make. I almost always keep the sky out of forest compositions, and if I see an interesting sunset developing I’ll usually look for a more expansive view. But here I thought the pastel colors in the sky might complement the softness of the dogwood blossoms and lingering mist, and decided to stick with what was in front of me and see what I could do. It turned out to be one of my favorite images from the trip.
Before visiting the Smokies I’d seen many wonderful photographs of the southern Appalachian Mountains by people like Charles Cramer, Christopher Burkett, William Neill, and Nye Simmons. Their images mostly focused on the forests in spring and fall – understandably, since those eastern hardwood forests are so beautiful in those seasons. So I had certain expectations about what I might see, and the kind of photographs I might make, based on seeing their work.
I certainly hoped and expected to photograph dogwoods blooming. But spring came early to the lower elevations, and the dogwoods were mostly done by the time Claudia and I arrived a week before the conference. We did find a few dogwoods still blooming at higher elevations, so I made it a point to photograph those before they faded. But I realized that I wouldn’t be doing much dogwood photography on this trip, so I had to let go of that expectation and focus on other things.
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