Milestones: Winter in Rocky Mountain National Park

March 18, 2025 Sarah Marino

Note: This is the introductory essay for my portfolio of photos from a recent trip to Rocky Mountain National Park. You can view the full portfolio as a free PDF ebook or as a web gallery.

I wrote the first draft of this essay on a hot, cloudless, and windy day in the Mojave Desert. With the intense winds kicking a thick brown cloud into the air, we baked inside our trailer since we did not want to open the windows for better ventilation and, maybe, a cooling breeze. Just a few days before, I had been in wintery Estes Park, Colorado, to attend a photography conference and then explore Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) with six photography friends. On our best day of photography in RMNP, the temperature hovered around 4°F, with winds as intense as I was now experiencing in the desert. Instead of stirring up copious amounts of dust and keeping me inside, the winds in RMNP instead whipped powdery snow into the air, creating a hazy veil of sparkles and the appearance of drifting fog during the best moments.

Putting aside the intermittent sound of the wind whisking through the trees, the feeling of being enveloped in such a quiet landscape is the thread I followed as I created the photos in this portfolio. With the bright whites and blues of the snow blanketing the mountains, meadows, and trees, and soft clouds easing the light toward gentleness, the landscape often looked like a sea of pleasant pastels spread out in front of me, even if the weather—the wind, the blowing snow, and the very cold temperatures—made the experience itself intense and quite unpleasant at times.

Revisiting Backyard Ice Abstracts

January 31, 2025 Sarah Marino

Winter in southwestern Colorado has been quite cold this year—much colder compared to recent years. One benefit of all this cold weather is the chance to look for naturally occurring ice formations, or to try creating my own in our yard. While I generally consider myself to be a responsive photographer in which I exclusively react to the existing natural world around me, I occasionally like to experiment with photographing under slightly more controlled situations. With these ice experimentations, I consider my approach to be a partnership with nature in which I control some of the variables and then natural processes fill in the blanks.

2024 in Review #3 - Color Nature Photos

January 24, 2025 Sarah Marino

I’m glad I waited until January to pull together my favorite photos since I took this on December 30, 2024 at Point Lobos State Park in California. The park does not open until 8:00 am this time of year—well after sunrise—so photographing it required working with the more direct light instead of letting the limited opening hours keep us from photographing the area at all.

This is my third of three “year in review” posts. If you have not read the first two, you can find the first one with my black and white photos here and the second one with my plant photos here. For this final post, I am sharing my favorite color nature photographs from 2024 along with some reflections on how my photographic process has continued to evolve over the last year.

With 2023 and 2024, my transition from “landscape photographer” to “nature photographer” feels complete. I do not consider these labels to be important but do find them helpful for explaining how the scope of my work has expanded in recent years. Although I still consider myself a beginner and do not have many photos to share so far, I am enjoying bird and wildlife photography more than I ever expected I would, especially since it stretches my technical skills, is a nice way to fill in downtime, and is a good entry point to learning more about a landscape and its ecosystems. As I have broadened my photography interests to include grand landscapes, intimate landscapes, smaller scenes, abstracts, portraits of plants, and now more wildlife photography, my general enjoyment of this craft continues to grow.

2024 in Review #2: Portraits of Plants

January 21, 2025 Sarah Marino

Huckleberry in Autumn, Yellowstone National Park

This is my second of three “year in review” posts. If you have not read the first one, you can find it here for more context about my photography in 2024. For this post, I am sharing my favorite photos of plants, both from wild places and cultivated gardens.

2024 in Review #1 - Black and White

January 17, 2025 Sarah Marino

A blooming rock nettle plant in Death Valley National Park — one of my favorite desert wildflowers.

The end of 2024 turned out to be a bit of a whirlwind for me. After we returned from our final destination for fall colors, Zion National Park, I turned my attention to a full refresh of my website galleries. Because I was recovering from a badly sprained ankle, I had a lot of downtime to fill with the tedious tasks of deciding which photos to include, minor reprocessing, keywording, titling, captioning, sharpening, uploading, and then finally organizing. I had planned to get my yearly review posts out before the end of the year but instead shifted all my attention to getting the website refresh in a good place before we headed out to visit family for the Christmas holiday.

Ron: 2024 Recap

December 23, 2024 Ron Coscorrosa

Instead of sharing my favorite photographs of 2024 (side note: I have no idea what those are and never will!) I decided to change up the formula and just share photos from this year that haven’t been shared anywhere else yet.

Earlier this year I had three blog posts on Death Valley (Part I, Part II, Part III), and released portfolio ebooks of Iceland and Zion. The following photographs made no apperanace anywhere (most are from Death Valley and our fall trip to the Upper Midwest).

Zion National Park: Two Perspectives (Ebook Portfolio)

December 6, 2024 Sarah Marino

Note: This is the introductory essay to our newest free PDF ebook portfolio (one click download, no sign-up required). If you prefer, you can also see Sarah’s photos from the ebook in this online gallery.

Ron and I have created many collaborative photography projects in the past and we have carefully curated each one to avoid duplication. This ebook portfolio is different. In the pages that follow, you will see two portfolios of photographs, one from me and one from Ron, that we each created during our recent trip to Zion National Park in Utah. We separately edited, processed, and sequenced our individual collections without consulting one another, and are presenting them here as two distinct bodies of work that represent our individual connections with the landscape.

Constraints and Connections in White Sands National Park

September 19, 2024 Sarah Marino

When practicing nature photography in a new place, making a connection with the landscape sometimes feels effortless and instantaneous. With my first footsteps in such a place, many composition ideas spring to mind and a range of subjects are immediately compelling. Other places require more work, more time, better timing, a different mindset—and sometimes all of the above.

Do Not Delete: 4 Reasons to Keep Nearly All of Your Photo Files

August 30, 2024 Sarah Marino

A wildflower garden full of lupine, buckwheat, sage, and snowberry. Crested Butte, Colorado.

Earlier this week, I saw a post on a nature photography forum about how a forum member had just returned from a trip and as part of his culling process was deleting everything he didn’t immediately like. My reaction was NOOOOOOOOO! DO NOT DELETE!

Unless a file has a clear technical issue (extreme under exposure or is out of focus in a bad way) or was a clear mistake (tripping the shutter while carrying my camera around and creating a series of blurry photos of my feet), I have learned to save nearly all of my photography files for future me. Below, I’ll share four examples of why I am glad to have gotten into this habit in my early days as a photographer.

Iceland in Spring: New Portfolio Ebook From Ron

July 28, 2024 Ron Coscorrosa

In early June, we headed to Iceland for an 18-day photo trip. If you have visited Iceland yourself, you will not be surprised to hear that the weather was quite challenging and we had to completely change our plans in response. While we hoped to take our rental 4x4 campervan into the interior highlands, we ended up mostly sticking to the Ring Road because of rain, relentless wind, and quite a bit of late-season snow. Despite these challenges, we still had a lot of fun experiences, including visiting a puffin colony in the snow, photographing Iceland's incredible river deltas, and seeing a perfectly peak lupine bloom across the southern portion of the country (this non-native lupine is invasive but still quite beautiful to see).

I have collected my photos from the trip into a 129-page PDF ebook portfolio, which you can download for free without any sign-up or checkout required. Below is the brief essay I include at the beginning of the ebook, along with a handful of the 100+ photos from the book.

Ron: Death Valley Winter - Just Rocks (3 of 3)

July 16, 2024 Ron Coscorrosa

This is the third in a series of three posts featuring my photographs from Death Valley National Park taken over the 2023-2024 winter season (first part here, second part here).

Death Valley is known for many things: the salt flats and polygons at Badwater Basin, the various sand dunes scattered across the park, and the impressive and colorful badlands. Perhaps less appreciated are the mountains, alluvial fans, and canyons spread across the park—and the rocks that comprise them.

Ron: Death Valley Winter - Lake Manly (Part 2 of 3)

June 16, 2024 Ron Coscorrosa

This is the second in a three part series of photos from Death Valley taken this winter (see first post here). This post is about Lake Manly.

Lake Manly was a permanent feature in Death Valley until it evaporated about 10,000 years ago and now only forms during periods of heavy rainfall. During Hurricane Hilary in August 2023, heavy rains repopulated the ephemeral lake, and atmospheric river events in January actually raised the water level. During a few wind events in late February, the lake blew to the north before resettling back south and finally fully evaporating by May 2024. Watching the lake move was a surreal experience. Photographer Jerry Dodrill shared a video of the lake actually moving on his Instagram page and you can view it here.

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