While walking around on the beach one morning a couple of years ago, I walked past this group of rocks half-submerged in the sand.  The receding water had left little pools around each and had left a small channel back to the ocean.

By shooting this into the direction of the sun I obscured a lot of the details in the photo, leaving only the basic forms and some texture in the sand.

A wide angle lens added some perspective to the foreground, elongating the sand near my feet.

I just like the simple forms and the textures in this image.

I took this photo 2 years ago while walking around San Francisco.

I had a new lens attached to my camera – the Nikon 105mm macro lens on my relatively new D300 camera.  I hadn’t had this lens for too long at this point but already I was excited about the image quality that it produced.  The most obvious aspect is the out of focus area (bokeh).  Because of the lens’ design, the out of focus regions of the image are rendered in this dreamy smooth texture.  This photo demonstrates that when you look at the areas of color contrast – look in the background at where the yellow center of the flowers (stamen) touches the whiter petals – or more obviously white meets the dark green.  These exchanges are very broad yet well defined.  It’s this dreamlike state in the background that makes the in-focus areas of the photo pop.

I shot this image with an aperture of f/4 – just down from fully open to give me a broad enough depth of field to get the stamen of the front flower mostly in focus but at this aperture the petals that are protruding out closer to the lens are starting to lose focus (especially at the tips) and only the petals that are lying flat on the plane along the yellow stamen stay in focus.

This was all shot hand-held and as I recall there was enough of a breeze to make a good shot challenging so I was happy with the results.  I would have preferred to have the entirety of the stamen in sharp focus, and with a more stable setup, I would have played around more with the aperture to see if the image would be improved with the entire flower in focus or not.  But, as I was just out walking around the neighborhood, I was happy with what I got.

I took this photo of Webb back in 2004 when we were sitting in a Japanese restaurant in New York.  We were killing time waiting to head over to Laurie’s wedding.

The light behind Webb really caught my eye and I knew I wanted to take a silhouetted portrait but I wasn’t sure how my Olympus point & shoot digital would handle it.

Ever since a snapshot I took in Paris back in 2001, (with a film Olympus point & shoot) I’ve been intrigued by silhouetted shots and this shot was definitely an attempt to capture a certain mood that I think silhouettes get.

In general I like the way the photo came out.  I like that the subject is mostly in the dark but there’s enough there that you can make him out.  I like the orange wall, which was what I really wanted to capture.  I’m not super excited about the reflections over his left shoulder (of the street behind be) but there’s enough separation between them and the subject that it doesn’t bother me too much.  Had they framed up where they were interfering with his shoulder then I think it would ruin the shot.

This was the scene we awoke to while out snowcamping in the Echo Lakes basin near Lake Tahoe, California.

The evening was pretty mild and the previous day had been sunny and near cloudless but these skies, first thing in the morning, were a sign that weather was approaching.  We decided to pack up our camp and head out, and it turned out to be the right decision as a storm did head in and bring snow and cold into the region.  On our trek out we were under heavy clouds the whole way and the snow started as we neared the car.

I exposed this photo for the clouds but I didn’t compensate enough and still managed to blow out some of the brighter areas.  I was shooting for a silhouette of the trees and mountains so I wasn’t concerned with losing details in the shadows.  The dead tree on the right was my main point of composition – I wanted to give it enough space in the frame (on the right and at the top) while still capturing just enough of the distant horizon to give the clouds the majority of the frame.  I also liked the cut-off tree in the left of the frame to help hold down that side.  Looking now, it would have been nicer if I would have been able to capture more of the trunk along the edge.

I didn’t do much in post production other than bring down the blacks deeper and punch a little color into the sky to better represent what we saw, peeking out from our tent.

Last year Meghan and I went for a weekend snowshoe in the Sierra Nevada just outside of Lake Tahoe.  It was one of those great Sierra spring weekends with blue skies and warm weather.  Which was good as we were going to be camping out on the snow.

We hiked along the trail until it lead us to Echo Lakes where we had to decide whether we would walk around or directly atop the lake.  Given the warm weather we were a little hesitant but the snow covering proved to provide enough insulation from the bright sun and onward we trekked.  Besides, the conditions were definitely better than the last time I had been in this area where the lake was really starting to thaw..  (That prior trip pre-dates this site so I don’t have any photos to link to).

I snapped several shots of the surrounding wilderness and stitched them together once back home in front of photoshop.  This shot was a little tricky to put together as there’s a lot of dynamic range from the bright white clouds and snow to the dark pine trees.  I had to compress the brightness a bit in order to keep the photo from blowing out the whites or losing detail in the darks.

What I like about panorama shots like this is that it really helps represent the breadth and grandeur of the scene that was in front of us.  Yes, the far end of the lake really looked that distant.  And yes, the view really was that expansive.

For this shot I used my Canon G10 -  I was trying to pack light for this trip as the winter camping gear is enough to carry.  I’m satisfied with the resulting image (and the other images from this trip) and continue to think this is a great camera, even though I’m starting to covet something new..

Tioga Pass Resort is one of those great California places.

At least, it used to be in the winter.  Each year we eagerly await to see if it will be open and each year we’re met with disappointment.  For some not-too-clear reason the lodge has been closed for the last several years in the winter (though it remains a popular summer resort).

Its location on the Eastern entrance to Yosemite gives it great access to the Yosemite high country which is otherwise a little difficult to reach in the winter (the ski in to the lodge is about 7 miles up hill which would be a pretty good day with full backpacks).

This photo was taken during one of our visits, on our last day of that stay.  Jim, Jimbo and I climbed up one of the faces above Ellery Lake for one last bowl run before heading out Tioga Pass road.

I framed this up with my Olympus D40 point and shoot camera with Jim along the edge of the frame and waited for Jimbo to get a little distance between us.  The point and shoot suffered from shutter lag like all digital cameras of that era so I wasn’t able to time the shot precisely but I like the results.

I’m happy with the progress that digital cameras have made in the last 5 years but I’m also amazed at the quality some of these earlier cameras were able to achieve.  Really the best improvements to the cameras in that time have been around usability and reliability more than image quality – though that being said, newer cameras do have amazing resolution and low-light capabilities.

But really, it’s about getting out there and being in the mountains more than it is about the camera.