In this post, I share some highlights from 2023 along with some reflections on my current creative practices, thoughts about the direction of our photo business, some loose goals for 2024, and a short rumination about AI’s potential impact on my chosen career. If you are mostly here for the photos, you can skip ahead to the middle of the post. Before jumping into the text, I would like to thank you for being part of my photo community. I appreciate each of you and wish you the best for 2024!
2023 Highlights
I spent a lot of time photographing, including both my typical nature subjects and also learning to photograph wildlife and birds. We finally went to Alaska, which I have wanted to do since my early twenties—and it was so much better than I expected. Ron also had a six-week sabbatical from work and we had so much fun rambling around the desert in January and February.
We fully revised and expanded our popular ebook, Desert Paradise: The Landscape Photographer’s Guide to Death Valley. I am getting close to being finished with a fully revised second edition of our Beyond the Grand Landscape ebook (now a course), which I will release soon if I stop expanding the scope of the project. 🤷🏻♀️
I signed up for a very expensive and totally disappointing online workshop on creating a photo book and it helped me make the decision to create a photo book. After laying the groundwork in 2023, this will be my main focus for 2024. The book (and by book I mean a physical book that you can hold in your hands, not an ebook like all of our other publications to date): Desert Wild: Death Valley National Park.
I processed and shared two large portfolios of new work from Acadia National Park and Mount Rainier National Park. I am pretty proud of both of these bodies of work.
I started writing weekly blog posts. I want to be a more disciplined person and it has helped to set this expectation for myself. I need to do a better job of working on these posts in advance and having more of a plan but done is better than perfect, right?
I spoke to quite a few photo clubs, had my work featured in a long profile for Elements Magazine, participated in some fun interviews (Talking Landscape Photography episode 108, Wild Women in Photography episode 9, Landscape Photography World episode 126, Photomasters with Ian Plant, and Brews n’ Views), enjoyed some other fun in-person and online teaching opportunities (like Nic Stover’s Speaker Series), and made a few YouTube videos (should do more but they are so much/too much work).
I revamped a lot of our business-related things (moving our store, moving to a new newsletter provider, cleaning up our website, etc).
THE CREATIVE SIDE OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Last year felt like a tug of war. On one side of the rope, I feel great about my progress. On the other side of the rope, I feel like I am stagnating a little bit. I hope that 2024 will allow some time and space for me to bring these two competing feelings into better alignment.
On the positive side, I invested significant time in building my naturalist skills. We spent an inspiring three days with expert birders rafting along the Colorado River, plus extended time in the field with Colorado native plant masters learning about local wildflowers. A good portion of my reading and learning is focused on nature-related topics and this time has helped me gain knowledge and cultivate curiosity. My observation skills have vastly improved as a result and I feel more connected to the landscapes I visit and photograph. With more time and continued work in this direction, I think this will all lead to me being able to more credibly call myself a “conservation photographer.”
On the more challenging side, I see my photography stagnating in some ways, often because I turn to my established habits instead of taking more creative risks. While I feel satisfied with many of my individual photos and feel proud of my portfolio as a whole, I also return to the same composition habits too often. In some ways, this brings consistency and a thread of harmony to my portfolio but it also feels too predictable.
Aside from aimlessly browsing my Lightroom catalog, my strongest photography skill is seeing and photographing patterns and repetition in various forms. While I plan to continue doing this style of photography because it brings me joy, I would like to be a more versatile photographer and have a more diverse portfolio, including more mid-range intimate landscapes, grand scenes, and non-representational abstracts. Since I frequently dwell on the albatross that is my photo backlog, there is no need to go into detail again here but will say that I really need to figure out a way to more consistently bring the same vigor I have in the field to processing and sharing my photos.
THE BUSINESS SIDE OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Overall, 2023 was a year of rebuilding, which was really hard at the beginning of the year but feels good right now. A few years ago, I had a conversation about business with Josh Cripps—a conversation that he probably does not remember but that has stuck with me and that I finally acted on late last year. We were talking about how to balance your own projects and partnering with others. With Josh’s analogy, we can think about business-related activities like a bicycle wheel. There is a hub (the business) and there are spokes (each project can be thought of as a spoke and you only have room for so many spokes).
This idea resonated at the time because my business was almost entirely made up of being a spoke on someone else’s wheel. I was constantly helping others build their hubs but was doing little to build my own. In practice, this looked like teaching at conferences that other people were organizing, writing articles for other people’s publications, selling my ebooks through other people’s stores, and speaking to photo clubs for very low pay. I was spending almost all of my time helping other people build their businesses with my ideas and photos. In some cases, I was not careful about assessing opportunities and said yes to some situations where others were plainly using me. In other cases, I had a great collaborative experience and value those relationships today.
While some of these activities were helpful in getting established in this field, I wasn’t building my business—I was helping other people build their businesses. Over the course of 2023, I have moved to spending much more of my time on building my own hub and most of my spokes (projects) are things that I control to a greater degree. Working with partners is still important and is often one of the more fulfilling parts of this career, but I am now more careful about assessing each opportunity in terms of how it helps me build my own business. I now choose to spend my time on things like creating articles or videos that I can share as I wish, developing my own newsletter list, and building our own store. This quick comment from Josh a few years ago has become such an important piece of advice and in 2023 was especially helpful in making decisions about how I should spend my time.
DIRECTION FOR 2024
My goals for 2024 are simple: continue writing weekly blog posts, finish the Desert Wild project, and make some progress on my processing backlog. I also want to continue to work on being more disciplined, consistent, and responsive. I’d like to be better about planning ahead so I am not always feeling crunched for time on big projects. I continue to struggle with feeling lonely in this field so I plan to invest more time in building stronger and more sustainable relationships with colleagues in 2024, too.
Beyond my tiny little corner on the internet, the emergence of AI and feeling powerless in the face of significant uncertainty has been a source of some anxiety, and it makes me question the viability of this career beyond the next few years. I have been self-employed since 2011. The main reason that I initially decided to start my own business is because I wanted more control over my future, and aside from missing the community aspect of being part of a team, I have been fully satisfied with this choice. Up until now, I have also been an early adopter of technology trends, especially since many of these technologies have been powerful tools for small business owners in particular. Being adaptable is something I strongly value but I just do not have these same warm and fuzzy feelings about AI tools as I have had about other emerging technologies in the past.
While it is exciting to be able to remove noise from an ISO 3200 file with a single click, it is disconcerting to see AI companies essentially steal the creative ideas of others to build their models without consent or compensation. Separately, with the emergence of ChatGPT and other similar products, it feels like writing for an audience might become futile when most people in the future just want aggregated and summarized results. I have tried a variety of these tools and just cannot figure out a single way to integrate them into my working life (aside from Adobe’s Denoise, which is pretty fantastic). Yes, I could farm out my blog posts to a text-generating machine but then I am giving up the one thing I still have as an asset in the face of these technology changes: my voice and perspective. These models also produce text with a comically predictable tone and require extensive corrections so why would I give up my credibility to—maybe—save a little bit of time?
Again: the tug of war. I simultaneously feel positive about the next year or so while also feeling some dread about becoming irrelevant due to the massive technological disruption that will be taking place over the next decade. Right now, if I had to place a bet on the future of nature photography as a career, I’d predict that there will continue to be a viable marketplace for bespoke photo education, workshops that take place in the actual outdoors, and nature photography (creating photos of the real world using a camera operated by a human with a unique perspective), but that market will be substantially smaller, increasingly competitive, and constantly weighed down with issues related to authenticity and dishonesty about artistic methods.
2023 PHOTO TRIPS
Enough AI doom and gloom… Onto the photos! Since the vast majority of my files from 2023 remain unsorted and unprocessed, this is not a “favorites” list. Instead, I am sharing a few photos from some of the places we photographed over the course of the year.
We started the year in Death Valley National Park and focused most of our time on exploring more canyons, adding 19 locations to our Death Valley canyons list (currently at 74 for me and 77 for Ron). These hikes ranged from shorter explorations of easier-to-access side canyons to long cross-country routes that required more complex planning and navigation. A few of these hikes were particularly exciting because we were uncertain about the route going in (is that dark thing on Google Earth—six miles into a hike over rough terrain—a small rock shelf or an impassable dry fall?). Each of these more challenging routes ended up being successful and we reached a few especially special places. (I am saving these photos for our Desert Wild book project and related activities.) We found some of the easier canyons to be impressive as well, with their slabs of wild rock specimens and interesting plants.
We were able to do all of this hiking because Ron earned a six-week sabbatical from work at the beginning of 2023. We planned to use the sabbatical time to go to New Zealand but due to developing job-related circumstances, we decided we needed to use it more quickly (that turned out to be the right decision since Ron changed jobs shortly thereafter). The New Zealand sabbatical became a ramble around the California desert. This felt disappointing at first but we ended up thoroughly enjoying the ability to more deeply explore a some familiar places at a slower pace.
After leaving Death Valley, we headed to Los Angeles to photograph plants at The Huntington’s gardens and enjoy some good food (lots of dumplings). This part of the trip ended up being somewhat disappointing due to urgent truck repairs, very rainy weather, and unexpected garden closures. Southern California received significant accumulating rainfall over the winter and garden management feared that some of the trees might topple over due to the combination of saturated soils and high winds. The succulent garden at Huntington is among my favorite places to photograph plants so even the limited time we had there was photographically productive and fun. I most enjoyed photographing the aloe above, returning to it a few different times during our visits.
All this rain meant lush wildflower blooms in some desert locations, so we headed to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park via Palm Springs and Joshua Tree National Park. Anza-Borrego is a lovely, varied, and sometimes chaotic desert landscape that I have a hard time photographing. Each time we have visited, the landscape looks exciting from the car but then I struggle to pull anything together once we are outside. That theme continued during this visit so I mostly focused on photographing desert wildflowers and plants. This did not feel like a concession since we saw, photographed, and smelled quite a few new-to-us flowers. We especially enjoyed massive patches of electric purple sand verbena (below) that sprawled across the desert floor.
After returning from the sabbatical trip in April, we planned to stay around home in southwestern Colorado for the summer, hoping to hike and backpack most weekends. May started off on a high note with a multi-day rafting trip along the Colorado River. Shortly thereafter, my stubbornness interrupted our general plans after I badly injured my back while doing a home project. (Ron said he would help me the following morning but I insisted on doing it myself…and the results were unfortunate.) Although sitting was painful, walking felt good so I bought a Cotton Carrier photo harness and started photographing birds close to home. Although I would have preferred to skip the injury, this turned out to be great practice for our autumn trip to Alaska. Before this point, I had never changed the autofocus mode on my camera and had no idea how to work with moving subjects. It was both exhilarating and frustrating to work in such a different way.
Spring in southwestern Colorado is one of my favorite times of year and we were able to experience a diverse range of photographic opportunities: delicate swaths of tender green leaves on the aspen trees, fresh corn lily plants in wet meadows, and the Gambel oaks offering a range of colors as their leaves develop. This progression of spring color is almost as pretty as the autumn transition that draws thousands of photographers to this area each fall. As spring progressed into summer, we also enjoyed a lush lupine bloom in the mountains and an impressive claret cup cactus bloom at lower elevations.
We planned for an extended season of autumn photography, starting in Alaska, progressing to Colorado, and finishing up in Utah. In late August, we rented a small RV and rambled around Alaska for about two and a half weeks. We organized the trip as a survey, moving quickly and seeing a lot of places. Alaska felt like a vast, overwhelming amalgamation of some of our favorite places: the Pacific Northwest, Acadia National Park, and Iceland, all wrapped up into one (massive) state. While surrounded by dramatic mountain and coastal scenery, I mostly focused my camera on the little scenes at my feet or slices of the landscape that I could isolate at 500mm. We experienced pretty awful weather with rain, rain, and then some more rain. Our orientation toward finding opportunities regardless of the conditions served us well and we agreed that this was one of our best trips to date.
After returning from Alaska, we packed our Airstream and headed to a quiet location for some Colorado autumn photography. We camped on a small plateau with a stunning mountain view and spent about ten days exploring the new-to-us area. Like everywhere else in the United States, some of the previously sleepy photo spots in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains can be overwhelmingly busy in autumn so it was lovely to find a beautiful pocket of scenery where we could be mostly alone. While I thoroughly enjoyed the photography experience, I do not feel particularly good about the resulting body of work so even though it is processed, I have not shared it anywhere yet. The photo below of a dead, frost-covered corn lily is my favorite from our time in Colorado. I know that this corn lily, along with the pollen-filled summer puddle below it, will seem like strange subjects but I thoroughly enjoyed finding and photographing both of these scenes.
We planned to end our year of photography in Zion National Park, partially because it was a convenient place to meet up with some friends and partially because we love the landscape. Although you wouldn’t know it by my meager online gallery, Zion is one of my favorite places for photography and one of my strongest portfolios of work is lurking in my unprocessed backlog of photos from the park. Because we have spent so much time there, I had to be diligent about trying not to repeat myself with one major exception. While in the park this year, we completed a backpacking trip for a second time: starting at Lava Point and ending up in Zion Canyon. While at camp one afternoon, we realized that we hiked the same route on the same day ten years ago. While I have similar photos from the previous trip, the sunrise at the spot below was too pretty to not photograph in the same way again.
When our camping reservation in Zion ended, I wanted to stay for another week or head to Death Valley. Ron felt tired—it is challenging to work a mentally intense job and photograph as much as he does, and he was ready to go home. Once we pulled into the driveway, I agreed that we made the right decision in heading home since I felt tired, too. We planned to rest for the winter but then somehow ended up in Death Valley for another two weeks. 🤷🏻♀️ First, Joe Rossbach posted an incredible photograph of Lake Manly, the temporary shallow lake created in August by Hurricane Hilary that is still filling parts of Badwater Basin with a thin layer of water. A few days after seeing Joe’s photo, I saw a Twitter post about wildflowers blooming in one corner of the park.
So much for the winter rest… The next day, we repacked the trailer and headed to Death Valley—an irresponsible decision from a work perspective but the right decision from a photography perspective. After a few very early morning tries, we experienced a pretty pink sunrise from Dante’s view along with varied conditions down at the lake itself. We also had fun photographing the birds around Furnace Creek, including a shockingly red vermilion flycatcher, and—of course—doing a little minor canyon exploring because that is what we do when we are in Death Valley. The photo below looks a little like ice but those mounds are actually salt, or saltbergs as we noted them in our Gaia GPS app.
And with those saltbergs, I’ll wrap up this post. Thank you again for your interest in my photography and writing. I am so grateful for the connections and friendships I have been able to make through nature photography, and I appreciate the time you spend here on this blog with me. I wish you a healthy, happy, and photo-filled 2024. Happy new year!