In the Moment:
Michael Frye's Landscape Photography Blog
by Michael Frye | Dec 15, 2024 | Advanced Techniques, Composition
Ice fingers, Yosemite NP, California. 400mm, 1 second at f/16, ISO 100; 18 focus-stacked frames blended with Helicon Focus Pro. I needed to photograph this detail at an angle to get the orange reflections, requiring focus-stacking to get everything sharp. (It’s a reflection of a cliff lit by the setting sun.)
Last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday two smaller storms moved through the Sierra, bringing rain and higher-elevation snow. But for a couple of weeks before that it had been dry and warm – reaching the upper 60s at our house in Mariposa.
Early last week, as we were starting our workshop in Yosemite Valley, temperatures cooled off a bit, allowing ice to form along the banks of the Merced River. It’s always fun to photograph ice like this, with its beautiful patterns, designs, and colors. But it can be challenging, both technically and creatively.
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by Michael Frye | Dec 1, 2024 | Light and Weather
Sunlight breaking through clouds and fog, Oregon Coast. During our workshop we waited out a brief-but-heavy rain shower by sheltering underneath a dense tree canopy. After we emerged clouds blocked the sun for awhile, but eventually sunlight broke through and backlit the wave-generated mist for a few beautiful minutes. 28mm, 3 seconds at f/11, ISO 100, ND filter.
Sometimes I’m out with my camera on a clear, sunny day, and a passerby says, “What a beautiful day for photography!” I just smile and agree; there’s no point in discussing the finer points of landscape photography with a passing stranger.
And of course you can make good photographs on clear, sunny days. Those conditions are perfect for many subjects and scenes. But landscapes are usually more interesting and photogenic with clouds, fog, mist, snow, or rain – and the light that weather helps create, like sunbeams, rainbows, dappled light, colorful sunsets, and so on.
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by Michael Frye | Nov 28, 2024 | Announcements
Sun setting behind a small tree, Oregon Coast. I’m grateful I get to see so many beautiful moments like this.
It’s Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. Whether or not you celebrate Thanksgiving in your part of the world, I think there’s value in gratitude – to giving thanks for all the things we have to be grateful for. We really should do that every day, but it’s good to have that reminder once a year.
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by Michael Frye | Nov 24, 2024 | Light and Weather
Breaking wave, Oregon Coast (from last Wednesday morning). This is one of the largest wave splashes I’ve ever seen. Note the gulls in front of the wave (you can click on this to see it larger). 192mm, 1/500 sec. at f/16, ISO 640.
After our Oregon Coast workshop Claudia and I hung around for a few more days, since we love this area, and the weather models were showing that more big waves were possible.
And I’m glad we stayed, as we did see some large waves last Monday, and then even bigger ones on Wednesday, after the “bomb cyclone” brought winds and heavy rain to the area on Tuesday and Tuesday night.
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by Michael Frye | Nov 17, 2024 | Light and Weather, Travels and Stories
Crashing wave on a foggy morning, Oregon Coast
We just finished another edition of our Oregon Coast workshop, and once again had a great time. We had a really nice group of people, which always makes it more fun for everyone. And we encountered some wonderfully stormy weather.
The forecasts for the workshop showed a series of storms, and rain every day. But that didn’t mean nonstop rain. I knew there would be breaks, and those breaks could generate some interesting light.
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by Michael Frye | Nov 7, 2024 | Light and Weather, Travels and Stories
Fog and Negit Island, sunrise, Mono Lake, California
On our way home from Montana last month, Claudia and I stopped for the night in Lee Vining (near Mono Lake, just east of Yosemite). We met our friends Charlotte and Gary Gibb there, and had dinner with them at the Whoa Nellie Deli.
It was raining – the first significant weather we’d encountered on our whole trip. Then, just before sunset, the rain stopped, and we saw signs of clearing, so we rushed out to the shore of Mono Lake to catch the sunset. While we didn’t see the sun breaking through, we caught a nice sunset glow over the lake:
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by Michael Frye | Oct 20, 2024 | Night Photography, Travels and Stories
Aurora reflected in Swiftcurrent Lake, Glacier NP, Montana. The aurora was dancing and shimmering at an incredible rate of speed when I made this photo. This is a stitched panorama; four frames, with the camera and 20mm lens turned vertically, blended with Lightroom’s Panorama Merge, and then run through Lightroom’s Denoise. I wasn’t sure if stitched panoramas would work with the aurora moving so quickly, but luckily they did (most of the time). Each frame was 1 second at f/1.8, ISO 6400.
In late September Claudia and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Millpond Music Festival in Bishop, California. Then we drove to Kanab, Utah, for the Nightscaper conference – which turned out to be a super fun event. Kudos to the National Parks at Night team (Lance Keimig, Chris Nicholson, Tim Cooper, Gabriel Biderman, and Matt Hill) for making everything run so smoothly!
After the conference, we planned to just go wherever things looked interesting. We decided to head to southwest Colorado to look for fall color. But as soon as we arrived I started getting alerts about increased solar activity, and the possibility of seeing auroras at mid latitudes.
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by Michael Frye | Oct 13, 2024 | Composition, Light and Weather
Misty sunrise from Tunnel View, Yosemite NP, California. Where does your eye go in this photograph? Here the brightest areas are in the middle of the image, while the edges are darker, helping to draw the eye into the picture, rather than out of the frame.
We launched our first online workshop about composition about 18 months ago, and then more recently added additional online workshops focused on light. I picked these topics because I think they are, hands down, the two most important aspects of photography.
In photography, nothing is more fundamental than light. When we press the shutter, we record the light falling on the film or sensor at that moment. Light is literally the medium we’re working with, and the quality of the light has everything to do with the mood and message of the photograph.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 15, 2024 | Travels and Stories, Vision and Creativity
Sand clouds, White Sands NP, New Mexico
Back in April, on our way to view the solar eclipse in Arkansas, Claudia and I stopped to photograph sand dunes in southern California and New Mexico.
The difference between those two locations was striking. The California dunes were in a remote corner of the Mojave Desert, and we saw only a few other people there. Footprints were scarce. White Sands National Park in New Mexico was teeming with visitors, including many people sliding down steep-sided dunes with snow-sliding devices. While it was nice to see people enjoying the dunes, you had to hike quite a distance to photograph footprint-free sand.
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by Michael Frye | Sep 5, 2024 | Announcements
Tomorrow, September 6th, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time, I’ll be one of the presenters in a free webinar hosted by the Out of Chicago team called Waterfalls, Wildflowers, and Wildlife. I’ll be joining several other instructors from next year’s Out of Great Smoky Mountains conference for this webinar, including Chrissy Donadi, Michele Sons, Dusty Doddridge, Stephanie Johnson, Kurt Budliger, and John Putnam, and we’ll each be sharing ideas and tips about photographing waterfalls, wildflowers, or wildlife.
The webinar is free, but you’ll need to register in advance to attend live:
Click here to register for the webinar.
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