The past week has been tasked with preparing my office for my upcoming 5 weeks absence, and parallel planning and packing for a 28 day rafting trip down the Colorado river in the Grand Canyon. There is no connectivity along the way, which means you won’t hear from me on this blog until late March.…
I’ve been using the Gitzo GT0541 in conjunction with the Really Right Stuff BH-25Pro Ulralight ballhead as a backpacking setup for a few years now. I’ve grown to really like it and find it sufficient and extremely light-weight for those day trip excursions that require a streamlined, but functional tripod. Every pound seems to count,…
I mentioned my trip into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in a recent post, and I have a few more photos to share from that journey. In a land that exhibits dramatic and distant vistas, it is not surprising to find compelling subjects close at hand as well. While hiking along the Marsh Fork of…
As a follow up to my previous post “wolf pack kills moose calf” last week, in which a colleague and I photographed a predator/prey scene in Denali National Park, I thought I’d make a few comments on the photographic equipment and technical side of that shoot, and then share a few pictures taken following the…
It’s going on six weeks since I had shoulder surgery, and I have not taken one photo in Alaska in 2010. That is the longest photo-free period for me ever. However, that is happily ending as I’m pushing equatorial boundaries again for the second time in three months, with travels to Peru (Machu Picchu-if the…
In a few days I leave for a month long trip to Antarctica as a staff member of Cheesman’s Ecology Safaris. Based on a 300 ft. Russian Ice Breaker, 100 passengers will voyage to the Malvinas Islands, South Georgia, the Orkney’s and the Antarctic Peninsula. I’ll be giving photo instruction and operating an inflatable boat…
The pursuit of northern lights photography led me to the purchase of Canon’s 24mm 1.4L, and the following updated version II of the same lens. My comments are derived from experience with this lens in the field and are not a comprehensive review by any measure. Here is what Canon has to say about this…
I was all ready to photograph the Gemenid meteor shower last night, but clouds moved in around midnight, which was a disappointment. However, on Sunday morning, I woke up to a faint aurora display, directly over my house. I grabbed my camera and took a few experimental shots. I say experimental because I was testing…
I’ve owned a Canon 5d Mark II for a few months now and have had some time to test it out under different shooting conditions. The digital files created by the camera are excellent, and this topic has been well discussed on the web already. What I’d like to share are a few comments specifically…
I left the world of direct, on-camera flash some years ago, and its a needed step to take for creative and interesting lighting of subjects. In the past, I’ve used Canon’s ST-E2 Infrared Transmitter (Or a Canon 580 serves the same function when set as master), which would trigger off camera flashes through a infrared…