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.

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.

It’ll Be Prettier Soon: Eclipse Trip Recap and Photos

May 16, 2024 Sarah Marino

Soft mist rises below a row of spring trees at Virgil Point Campground on the morning of the 2024 total eclipse.

In 2017, photo friends invited us to camp with them in Wyoming to view that year’s total solar eclipse. We accepted the invitation, mostly expecting some fun social time and an interesting life experience. By the time the eclipse ended, Ron and I both felt like it was a truly transcendent moment—one of the most special occurrences a person can experience in nature—and we decided we would put extra effort into seeing eclipses in the future.

As nature photographers, we contemplate the light that comes from the sun more than most humans. Sunlight interacting with the landscape throughout the day creates our photographic opportunities yet the sun itself is rarely included in our compositions and most often feels like a distant abstraction. During a total solar eclipse, the moon slides in front of the sun and the two come into perfect alignment for a few short minutes. As the moon blocks out much of the sun’s light, we can observe some of the sun’s qualities in a way that is not typically possible, and as a result, experience a much deeper sense of understanding, connection, and appreciation.

(Photographic) Happiness = Reality - Expectations: February + March 2024 Monthly Review

April 2, 2024 Sarah Marino

Ripples form after a flash flood, with the milky flood water filling the depressions. Death Valley National Park.

Well, I missed my monthly update for February and lost all momentum with my weekly blog posts. The reasons: ephemeral conditions in Death Valley, finishing the second edition of our significantly expanded and fully revised Beyond the Grand Landscape ebook, getting a nasty cold, and saying yes to social time in the desert whenever an invitation popped up.

Backyard Abstracts: Photos From My Ice Farming Operation

January 21, 2024 Sarah Marino

Over the last few years, we have occasionally put a tub of water in our backyard during colder weather to see if it might create some opportunities for photographing ice patterns. We never put much effort into this approach to photography because it seemed like we could usually find something more interesting in a natural setting. Enter Adam Gibbs and the preview pages for his new book, Land & Light. In one of the sample spreads, Adam shares a beautiful photo of frost patterns and describes the “ice farming” operation behind its creation.

This story made me decide to put a bit more effort into our own ice farming operation, especially since we were in the middle of a stretch of very cold weather. As I started experimenting with some new ideas, I hoped we might be able to create the conditions for frilly frost to form, like Adam showed in the photo in his book preview. Likely because of the humidity differences between damp Vancouver Island and dry southwestern Colorado, that frost never materialized as I had envisioned. With more experimentation, I eventually found an approach that created some tiny wild patterns.

Entering a Photo Competition? Consider This Advice

January 7, 2024 Sarah Marino

A lovely spiral aloe, referenced in the text below.

I have recently served as a judge for a few different photo club competitions (in addition to being a judge for five award seasons with international photo competitions) and continue to see the same issues pop up. Some of the issues are really basic, like dust spots and tilted horizons, while others are far more subjective. With these experiences in mind, I share some advice to consider when you prepare your next competition entry (or magazine submission, gallery show entry, portfolio, or even your next social media post). This article represents the perspective of exactly one judge—me—so don’t consider it a checklist but instead a single point of view on a complex topic.

Sarah's 2023 Photography Year In Review

January 1, 2024 Sarah Marino

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!

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