Monthly Review: Autumn Continues and Eclipse-Related Failures (#2.October 2023)

November 2, 2023 Sarah Marino

The type of conditions we missed this year in Colorado. I took this photo back in 2013 before this became an iconic view. I heard through the grapevine that beavers have changed the composition at this pond but I haven’t visited it myself for years due to the crowds. This is one of my most popular photos and I am happy that it has been the holiday card for a national conservation nonprofit twice, with more than a million cards printed.

Our October started and ended with photographing fall colors. Early in the month, we stayed close to home in southwestern Colorado, taking our Airstream trailer out for a week to a spot with lovely scenery and very few people. On most days, we saw only a car or two pass by our campsite near the area’s main road and aside from two people we know, did not see a single other photographer in the area. With a little exploration, it is easy to get away from the crowds, even in a place as popular as the aspen forests of Colorado in the fall. With mostly clear skies, we focused on smaller scenes and enjoyed a few frosty mornings. And then a lovely snowstorm rolled in and … we were not able to photograph it. 😓 After getting the COVID and flu vaccines at the same time, we were feeling too tired to head out into the wintery weather. It was disappointing to miss the autumn-winter mix but I should—obviously—not feel bad since I have been able to spend a lot of time on photography this autumn.

Alaska Wildlife from a Landscape Photographer's Perspective

October 27, 2023 Sarah Marino

A black bear takes a break from salmon-maiming to shake off. The shapes in the background are all dead salmon, many of them maimed by the bears searching for eggs. Live spawning salmon can also be seen in the creek. This photo is an example of how I needed to shift my thinking about composition. Normally, distractions like the dead salmon would have kept me from taking a photo of this scene. With wildlife photography, I decided they add important context.

To start our fall nature photography season this year, we went to Alaska at the end of August and ended up spending a lot of time photographing wildlife and birds. Although I always enjoy watching wild animals, I have never spent much time photographing them for a variety of reasons. Yet, with so many animals and birds around us, it seemed like I should at least give it a decent try and I ended up really enjoying the experience. It felt exciting to try something new, stretch my skills, and add a different kind of photography to my portfolio. The process of watching these animals and birds also deepened my understanding of these ecosystems and left me feeling more connected to the landscape. Below, I share a few favorite experiences, things I learned as a landscape photographer trying to photograph wildlife, and a few new photos. You can see the full gallery of photos here.

Look For Beauty All Around You: A Lesson from Female Birds and Arctic Ground Squirrels

October 19, 2023 Sarah Marino

In many ways, our modern society conditions us to find excitement and joy only at the pinnacle of experience. With nature photography, this looks like the epic sunset, the perfect swath of autumn color, or being in the presence of especially dramatic scenery. While I still seek out such experiences, I try to balance them with finding equal satisfaction and happiness with more common everyday experiences out in nature. A recent example: feeling full of joy and excitement when I saw a thriving four o-clock wildflower and its glowing magenta petals, with white-lined sphinx moths actively feeding on its nectar, in late October while on a casual evening walk in the Utah desert.

A few days ago, upon the recommendation of fellow photographer Dario Perizzolo, I listened to an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, “How Your Beliefs Shape Your Reality.” Near the end, the psychologist being interviewed, Jer Clifton, suggested a simple mental exercise to help cultivate curiosity and promote this kind of connection with the natural world. Pick up a leaf from a tree and contemplate its beauty: the shape, the colors, the intricacy of the veins. If this leaf was rare, it would be considered a work of art but because it is so commonplace, it doesn’t command any special attention—or any attention at all.

Black and White: Learning to See Opportunities While Out in Nature

October 13, 2023 Sarah Marino

Midday light can work well for black and white photography. I headed out into these sand dunes in the early afternoon and found opportunities for photography through sunset. Canon R, 24mm, f/14, 1/2500 sec, ISO 400.

If you spend much time looking at nature photography on social media, you have probably seen a common type of post: a photographer, lamenting the poor conditions at the time, explains how they tried to salvage a photo by converting it to black and white. Before you read any further, I’m asking you to forever dismiss this kind of thinking about working in black and white. Instead of seeing black and white as a backup processing option when the conditions you hoped for do not materialize, I encourage you to instead think about black and white nature photography as an expressive form that stands on its own and holds the potential to open up many new creative avenues for sharing the connections you make with the natural world. A key step in shifting this mindset is learning to see opportunities for black and white photography while you are out in nature.

Monthly Review: Alaska, Photo Backlogs, and Stuff Peppers (#1.September 2023)

October 3, 2023 Sarah Marino

A few minutes of pretty light at Mount Rainier National Park. Canon R5, 2 seconds, 76mm, f/16, ISO 200.

This series is for our readers and for me. I am quite good at generating ideas but I need some help with discipline and follow-through. I plan to share a wrap-up like this at the end of each month through the end of 2024 to see if it helps me stay more accountable to myself. The basic format: an inventory of how I spent the last month with regard to nature photography and our photo business, a casual discussion about the things that are on my mind, and a few non-photography recommendations at the end. Thank you to Alex Kunz for the format inspiration.

Making the Most of Autumn: Essential Lessons for Nature Photographers

September 27, 2023 Sarah Marino

Golden light on ice-covered terraces, with a cottonwood leaf on top. As direct light hit the cliffs above, the warm light reflected on the landscape below. Building your observation skills will hope you notice this kind of lighting situation when you are out in nature. Zion National Park. Canon R5, 472mm, f/16, 1/4 sec, ISO 100, 15 file focus stack.

Years ago, I saw this cynical comment on a website or forum related to nature and landscape photography: “The world does not need another aspen photo.” I’ll get to that sentiment later but before doing so, I’ll acknowledge that the same could be said about this blog post: “The world does not need another article about fall nature photography.” This morning, an email landed in my inbox with what I thought included some bad advice for photographing fall colors and that email started a journey into the Google rabbit hole of articles on this topic. After reading some of the articles at the top of my search results, I decided I had a bit more to add on the topic than is generally covered.

Nearly all of these “how to photograph fall colors” articles set photographers up for disappointment and encourage limited thinking by emphasizing the importance of getting your timing perfect for peak fall colors and seeking out the “best” weather, light, and locations. These ideas suggest that everything needs to align to create worthwhile photography conditions. My years of experience conversely show that conditions are rarely optimal so cultivating a different mindset and greater adaptability can both enhance the experience of being outside during autumn and result in a more interesting, personal, and diverse body of work.

Generally, our thinking and practices can limit our opportunities or expand them. I want to choose the practices and ideas, like the four lessons I share below, that expand my opportunities.

Notes From an Over-Photographed Landscape

September 22, 2022 Sarah Marino

Afternoon shadows fall across the Grapevine Mountains in Death Valley National Park.

PREFACE: This is the introductory essay for ebook portfolios covering my extended 2021-22 trip to Death Valley National Park. You can download these ebooks, for free, here to see the full collection of photographs.

With our Airstream RV trailer, we are able to work remotely for long stretches, so we packed up for the desert and arrived in Death Valley National Park right before Christmas, 2021. We stayed through late February, 2022, giving us about eight weeks in the park. Aside from two weeks of formal work (teaching workshops), I photographed, hiked, or both almost every day. This portfolio is the result of those efforts.

By the time we left to return home, the list of Death Valley canyons I have visited had many new entries, for a total of fifty-four. I can now say I have backpacked across Death Valley’s floor, an experience that makes the incredible vastness of the park feel much more profound than contemplating those same distances from the roadside. The scenery, as always, was endlessly enchanting. Solitude was easy to find. With photography friends coming and going, the trip felt a little like summer camp. As with every trip to this park, the list of new things I want to see is much longer than the list I had when I arrived. With the weather getting increasingly warm in late February, I knew it was time to head home but still tried to convince Ron that we should stay for just one more week. Just one more.

Ron's Recent Work from Death Valley

April 5, 2022 Ron Coscorrosa

After a busy fall in Colorado, the Adirondacks, Vermont, Maine, and Zion we took a needed break before heading to Death Valley in late December with our trailer and staying there nearly 8 weeks. That is a long time in a single place, but like every visit to Death Valley, we only scratched the surface of what is there to see and explore. Most free weekends were spent exploring the many canyons in and near the park. I have now visited over 60 Death Valley canyons - many without names and most with a few surprises.

Canyons (and the rocks within them) make up a large portion of my recent gallery of photographs from Death Valley, I have included a few favorites in this post, but see the full gallery for much more.

Ron's Recent Work and 2021 Favorites

December 11, 2021 Ron Coscorrosa

“Mountain of the Sunrise” - A colorful sunrise in Zion’s backcountry

Sarah and I have had a busy last few months. Since late August we’ve driven to Chicago and photographed the Chicago Botanic Gardens, drove home to briefly photograph fall in Colorado, drove east to photograph Acadia with a quick stop in Vermont, drove home and left two days later for Zion National Park where we spent three weeks in the trailer and a few nights in our tent. All of this while working (me as a full time software developer, and Sarah by teaching at many of the places we were visiting). By the end, actually well before the end, we were exhausted!

I would much rather have this level of intensity where I spend multiple weeks in a location rather than the weekend warrior style of being at a place for 3 days and not getting a chance to explore it deeply. There is probably a healthier balance out there - one that continues to remains elusive though almost certainly involves less driving.

All of that is a long winded way of saying I have a bunch of new photos from Colorado, Vermont, Acadia, and Zion (over 150, I know…), and because it’s the end of the year, a gallery of my 50-ish favorites from 2021, all linked below.

New Ebook - Lessons from the Landscape: Yellowstone National Park

September 13, 2021 Sarah Marino

I am happy to announce my newest ebook, Lessons from the Landscape: Yellowstone National Park, which includes an almost entirely new portfolio of photographs, eleven personal essays, and six practical case studies. This is my most personal project yet, and I am excited to share it with you.

You can get the ebook for the discounted price of $19.95 through Tuesday, September 14. See below for more details.

New Black and White Plant Photos

June 28, 2021 Sarah Marino

I am continuing to work through my archive of unprocessed files and processed-but-never-finished-and-shared files. At each turn, it feels like the scope of the project grows, mostly because integrating new photos into existing portfolios means that I also need to spend time updating and revising formerly finished files since my tastes have changed significantly over the last few years. I am making slow progress in the right direction so I hope to have a lot of new photos to share as I plod along through my Lightroom catalog.

One of my recent projects focused on finishing some new black and white photos of plants. I added about twenty new photos to our website and then split up a single gallery into three galleries for more cohesive organization.

Badlands from Above: New Photos and Thoughts on Drone Photography

April 27, 2021 Sarah Marino

A few years ago, we added a drone (a DJI Mavic Pro 2) to our photography kit and I have come to have a love/hate relationship with it. To begin with the love, it is an incredible piece of technology - a flying camera that can take sharp photos with exposure times of more than a second in calm conditions. This is worth saying again so we can spend a few seconds marveling together: a flying camera that is affordable enough to add to a nature photography kit! Wow! And it is about the size of a Nalgene water bottle when folded up. Wow again!

One of the things I enjoy most about aerial photography with a drone is how the resulting photos tell a totally different story than the one you experience when walking across the same landscape (if you can, in fact, walk across it). For example, in the photos below, you will see many tiny channels. These channels feel individually consequential when you walk up one of them but then become an extensive sea of branching watercourses when seen from the air. One individual channel becomes only a tiny part of a massive network from this alternative perspective. Every time we use a drone for aerial photography in addition to our typical land-based photography, I walk away with a much greater appreciation for the area and have more context for how different parts of a landscape fit and flow together.

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