Desert candles (Caulanthus inflatus). April 22nd 2023, Photographed in Carrizo Plain National Monument, a good place to find these unique flowers, but only after strong winter rains have produced a ‘superbloom’.

Following a succession of drenching winter ‘atmospheric river’ storms, online predictions were for an exceptional superbloom this spring. Anne and I first travelled out to Carrizo Plain near the end of March, which had been near the peak of the spectacular blooming seasons in 2017 and 2019. But this year the flowers were much delayed. Temperatures had remained cold into springtime - well below freezing at our usual campsite in the Caliente Mountains - and there was little color to be found. A second visit a week later also proved to be too early, though yellows of hillside daisies were appearing on the mountains at the northern end of the plain along highway 58. Mostly, though, I spent my time doing macro shots of individual flowers, as grand colorful scenics were lacking.

On our final visit on April 22nd everything had changed; a true superbloom was probably near its peak. Most spectacularly, the slopes of the Temblor Range stretched as an artist’s palette of yellow, orange, blue and purple for over 30 miles bordering the Elkhorn plain. Although individual areas had been as vivid in 2017 and 2019, I had never seen the entire range carpeted so uniformly. Flowers were everywhere; but so were visitors, attracted to this usually remote region by news articles reporting that the flowers could be seen from space. Not at all a quiet and serene experience along the main Soda Lake road, so we escaped to find solitude by driving up the rugged 4wd trail leading up to the southern end of the Temblors. Once on the switchback ridge we encountered only one other vehicle and gained expansive views down the  canyons dropping on each side.  Indeed, we were privileged to find fields of flowers at least as vivid as those down in the plains, but would be seen by only a handful among the tens of thousands of visitors to the more accessible parts of the Monument.  Our 15 year old Xterra with 250k miles on it proved again an enduring resource for exploration and photography!

High on the steep slopes of the Temblors I was surprised to find dense growths of desert candles - unique flowering plants growing to 2 or 3 feet high with a thick swollen stem that looks like a yellow candle. They are native to the Mojave Desert and surrounding mountain ranges in southern California and Nevada, occurring at elevations from about 500 to 4000ft.  I had seen and photographed them during previous superblooms, and on our earlier visits this year, but only in small groups restricted along the edge of washes where I had assumed they were restricted to well-watered sites. But here were veritable forests of desert candles, extending hundreds of feet across steep, open slopes.

I wanted to find a way to photographically convey the extent and density of this rare phenomenon. My initial compositions photographing over the tops of the candles with the plains and mountains in the background looked as if they would provide only straight ‘record’ shots, without capturing the feel of being immersed in a forest of flowers. To attempt something different, I next tried photographing with a wide angle lens pointed straight down, like a low level drone shot, raising and extending the camera on a tripod to avoid getting my feet in the frame. I suspect that those images might work as a large print, but the density of flower and leaf detail just appears as a muddled mess at sizes for online presentation.

Finally, I thought to turn that approach upside down – photographing with the camera on the ground looking up, a viewpoint that has worked well for me in forests (of trees!) and even groups of people. So, tiptoeing carefully to the heart of a desert candle forest to avoid crushing the flowers, I set a ten second timer, placed my camera face up in the dirt and retreated a little way to be out of the frame. I took care to ensure that the lens was shielded from direct sunlight by the shadow of a leaf and chose locations with a good density of candles that would still leave an open window of sky above. Nevertheless, it was difficult to predict the outcome before seeing what appeared on the viewfinder screen, so I took several shots from which I could later make a selection.

Creating the final image then took a bit more finagling in Photoshop.  This sort of ‘looking to the heavens’ perspective works best using a very wide or fish-eye lens, but the widest lens I had with me was Canon’s recent 16 mm, f2.8. This is a neat lens, very small, very light and surprisingly inexpensive. However, to combine those attributes the designers abandoned any attempt at correcting the lens for inherent distortions. As focused on the sensor in the camera the image is stretched, straight lines appear curved, and the corners are clipped to black. Normally, all these defects are taken care of during digital processing by the camera or computer, but in this case I took advantage of the wider field of view of the raw, unprocessed image by turning off the software corrections in Photoshop.  There are no straight lines, and the distortions resulting from the unusual perspective are a large part of what makes the image interesting. Applying more distortion by stretching the corners to remove the vignetting only helped increase the effect. The end result is thus not strictly photorealistic, but better conveys the experience of a desert mouse running among the towering candles.

Red-crowned cranes, Tsurui Ito Crane Reserve, Hokkaido, Japan

A first highlight on our recent February trip to Japan with Joe Van Os Photo Safaris was the opportunity to photograph red-crowned cranes in snow-covered Hokkaido. The crane (Grus japonensis; Tancho in Japanese) is a potent icon, symbolic of Japan almost as much as images of Mt. Fuji, and is regarded as the bird of happiness, fidelity and long life. Paradoxically, however, the species was almost annihilated by hunting and erosion of its breeding grounds.  At a time when its population was on the verge of extinction, more than 10 Japanese Cranes were discovered in the marshlands of Kushiro in 1924. Since that time, efforts have been made to protect and increase their population. The Japanese Crane was officially recognized as a natural monument in 1952, and in 1958 the first Japanese Crane Reserve was established. We visited two reserves, where the cranes are protected and fed during the Winter.

Visitors to the crane reserves are restricted by fences around the fields where the cranes gather, so my 800 mm F11 lens proved very useful to capture the birds at long distance. I had hoped for some fresh snowfall during our three days at the reserves, but we had unfailingly ‘good’ weather with clear skies and sunshine. Although there was a good depth of snow on the ground, this was heavily trampled by the cranes, making for a highly textured, distracting background across the main part of the fields, which lay below the viewing areas. Instead, I concentrated on birds that landed on a small rise that gave a more eye-level perspective against a background of trees. In the morning the view lay almost directly into the sun, backlighting the crane’s feathers and rim-lighting their outlines against the dark, shadowed trees in the distance.

The red-crowned cranes are named for the patch of red bare skin on the crown, which becomes brighter during the mating season. They must be among the most elegant of all birds, as much as 5 ft tall, snow white in color with black on the wing secondaries, which can appear almost like a black tail when they are standing. As illustrated here, the cranes exhibit an endearing and exceptionally photogenic behavior by dancing in duets that are thought to help form and maintain monogamous pair bonds. The main part of the duet begins with a long male call. The pair moves rhythmically until they are standing close, throwing their heads back and letting out a fluting call in unison, often triggering other pairs to start duetting, as well.

Courtyard of the Continuing Education Building, University of California, Irvine

During the covid-19 pandemic my day-to-day universe has shrunk to walking distance from home. However, we are fortunate to live of the campus of UCI, which has given me many new photographic subject and ideas. The campus is new – founded only in 1965 – so the architecture cannot rival that of old institutions such as Cambridge.  Nevertheless, there is much to be found. The original campus buildings were constructed in a uniform ‘brutalist’ style; a description that has a specific meaning in architecture, but does well describe them in an everyday sense of the word (scroll down to  P-o-t-M #148). After about 1975 however, that uniformity was abandoned, and subsequent buildings display more individuality, and sometimes a little quirkiness.

A recent (2016) addition - the extension building for Continuing Education, designed by LMN Architects - is a nice exemplar. The building itself is arranged in a U-shaped configuration, but the visual highlight is a broad courtyard within the center of the U. From the architect’s description “An expansive 6,150-square-foot central courtyard organizes the design, resulting in an outdoor living room that instills a sense of connectivity for the program as a whole, as well as for the larger campus” Notably, "The courtyard soaks up sunlight from the west, while mitigating the impact of glare and heat through a large brise-soleil patterned with 25-kW photovoltaic panels, which in the first month of operation produced 18% of the building's energy needs. The spatial configuration of the courtyard and the solar panel trellis were carefully calibrated to achieve a comfortable, inviting combination of shade and filtered sunlight at all times of day."

The courtyard is indeed an impressive and inviting space, with the massive overhead brise-soleil grid forming a porous roof to give a semi-enclosed, indoor/outdoor feel.  To capture a photograph encompassing this vast space I was going to need a super-wide lens, and a viewpoint from one corner. Moreover, I would need to be at half-height, to keep the cameral level while including both the ground and the roof grid within the frame. A staircase leading up from the outer edge of the courtyard looked as if it would get me exactly where I wanted to be. From the first floor I was too low, on the second floor still just a little low, whereas a few steps higher gave the perfect viewpoint. But, from the second floor upward, the stairway was enclosed by a stout steel wire mesh with a grid too fine to allow taking a photo between the wires. (A similar mesh encloses the staircase on the contemporary Learning Pavilion building – I don’t know the function, whether for safety reasons or merely decorative.) What to do? From the second floor I would have to tilt the camera so much the perspective would be distorted beyond the capability of Photoshop to correct. Well, the wire mesh was structured in vertical sheets, with a gap of only an inch between. That was too narrow to photograph through, but by pushing and pulling on adjacent sheets I could enlarge the gap just enough to insert through the (narrow) 9mm lens on my little Canon M5 camera. Once situated the lens was jammed in place by the taught wires. No need for a tripod! But leveling the camera rotated the focus ring, so it took a few goes to get everything set up with the composition framed and focused correctly. As a serendipitous bonus from this unconventional arrangement, the camera screen showed that the extreme field of view of the lens included the edge of the wire mesh. Thinking that this would provide a strong framing motif to complement the steel grid of the brise-soleil I stopped down the aperture to keep focus from the depth of the courtyard to the wire mesh only inches from the lens.

Badwater Basin, Death Valley, July 19, 2021

The Badwater ultramarathon - the 'World's toughest footrace' - begins each July at Badwater Basin, the lowest poin in the western hemisphere. From the start line runners progress through Death Valley (the hottest place on earth) and over three mountain ranges for 135 non-stop miles to the finish at the trailhead for Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous US. For many years I ran/walked the race, but more recently I have been returning in the capacity of race photographer. I have found this highly rewarding, foremost for the opportunity to reunite with the family of wonderful, but slightly crazy people who subject themselves to this torture - and with their dedicated support crews. Photographically, the race is also a chance to get back into the austere, beautiful landscapes of Death Valley and the Sierras.

For many years the race started in the early morning, so for the first 40 miles the competitors ran below sea level through the bottom of Death Valley during the hottest time of the day. That made for some great photos, with the endless salt flats and 11,000 ft Telescope Peak as bacground. But, a few years ago the National Park service undertook a safety review, and decided that it was too dangerous to have people running in 125 degree heat - despite the fact that that there had been no problems in races over the previous two decades. Now the race starts in the evening, with three 'waves' at 8:00, 9:30 and 11:pm.. The first wave of runners set off around sunset, and of course it is completely dark for the other two waves. Not great for photography! By first light the next morning most of the runners are beginning the climb out of Death Valley, gaining altitude and with it cooler air, but entering territory not quite as spectacular as Death Valley itself.

This month's photo features the start line shortly before the 8:00 pm wave, The race begins on the boardwalk and platform that gives access to the salt flats, and the spring-fed saline pools that give Badwater its name. This is almost the lowest point (the sign says 282 ft below sea level), but the true low point lies a couple of miles out across the dry lake bed. When I arrived the temperature was about 116 F (realatively cool!) and the air was clear, with the sun casting long shadows as it dipped toward the mountains. But in the distance to the north something ominous was blocking the view up the valley; a sandstorm, a haboob.. The wall of dust gradually came closer and started to engulf us. But it was a very gentle haboob - no strong winds just a gradual decrease in visibility. The sun was casting nice God rays into the sky, but because the sun was still just above the mountains, these were difficult to photograph because of sunlight shining strainght into the lens. The haboob took care of that, with the low sand cloud conveniently blocking the direct light.

Hut Point peninsula, Ross Island,Antarctica, 21st February, 2020

During our recent voyage to the Ross Sea Anne and I were privileged to visit the three huts built by British expeditions during the 'heroic age' of Antarctic exploration: the Discovery hut of Scott's first expedition in 1901; Shackleton's 1907 hut at Cape Royds; and Scott's 1910 hut at Cape Evans. Excepting staff at scientific bases, only some 400 visitors reach this region during a brief two month ice-free window each summer, and even then access to the huts is by no means guaranteed. Ice conditions, weather and high surf often preclude landings, and we were indeed fortunate to be able to visit all three.

Each of the huts has a powerful, though distinct ‘feel’ to it. Memories of the expedition members, their histories, triumphs and tragedies linger in each, and I got the shivers walking in through the doors. This was most pronounced with the Discovery hut.  As the first to be built, and because of its location at Hut Point on the tip of Ross island that provides direct access to the ice shelf and the Antarctic continent beyond, the Discovery hut encompasses multiple layers of history, having been used by all subsequent expeditions.  

A brief account [abstracted from the Antarctic Heritage Trust website]:

Scott’s Discovery Hut is a framed structure made of Douglas fir and Scots pine. Prefabricated in Sydney, its origins as a dwelling designed for the Australian outback are evident in the open verandah surrounding three sides. The hut proved too hard to heat and was described as more like a summer house. Consequently, it was never used as a base during Scott’s first expedition and the men lived on their ship, using the hut for scientific observations, drying equipment, repairs and as an entertainment house.
The Discovery hut was later used by three other heroic-era expeditions, all of which left their mark on the hut and its contents – most notably Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party. That group had ventured to McMurdo Sound on board the Aurora in order to lay supply depots for Shackleton, who was attempting the first traverse of Antarctica from the Weddell Sea on the other side of the continent, via the Pole, to Ross Island. The party made extensive use of the Discovery hut by sledging parties as they vainly laid depots for Shackleton’s team who had not even been able to start their journey when their ship, Endurance, was caught in sea-ice.
Their final, epic journey to establish the furthest south depot concluded with the return to Hut Point on 11 March 1916, by Richards, Wild and Joyce, with Hayward who was ill with scurvy. Two days previously, Spencer-Smith had died and been buried on the ice shelf, only a few miles from safety. The leader, Mackintosh, also ill with scurvy, had been left in a tent as his men dashed for safety. After caring for Hayward, the others then left on 14 March to collect Mackintosh. By 17 March, the four men were safely back at the hut, but were now trapped with little fuel or provisions until the sea-ice thickened sufficiently to enable the 15 mile crossing to their comfortable base at Cape Evans. Seals were killed for food and fuel, seal meat was cooked on a blubber stove, and Mackintosh and Hayward recuperated gradually. Everything was black with greasy soot… what a state of dirt and grease”.  By 7 May Mackintosh and Hayward had had enough of this cold, troglodyte existence and against the advice of the others left for Cape Evans as a blizzard was starting, never to be seen again. The remaining men eked out a grim existence, making clothes from penguin skins and chopping up part of the hut for fuel, before finally making a safe crossing to Cape Evans on 15 July when the ice was strong enough to bear their weight. The Discovery hut was not to be visited again for some 30 years.

Today, Scott’s first expedition base at Hut Point remains a testament not only to scientific endeavor but also to the hardships endured by its later occupants. Prior to our visit I had hoped to create an image that - more than a merely ‘straight’ photographic record - would communicate something of the intangible ‘feel’ of this history. How exactly I might achieve this remained a mystery until we were in the hut, when inspiration came as I looked at the screen of my camera to review the shots I had just taken. Because the light inside the hut was dim, I had set a slow shutter speed and stabilized the camera against a table or pillar while holding down the shutter button to take multiple shots from which to later select whichever came out sharpest. Often, I would take away the camera while the last exposure was still in progress. That created blurry images with ghostly streaks, giving me the idea that I might later selectively combine sharp and streaked frames in Photoshop to create the effect I was looking for. As a final touch, I converted the resulting image to monochrome, and applied a gentle sepia toning to resemble period photographs of that time.

My photo this month features the blubber-burning stove constructed during Scott’s second expedition by Oates and Mears out of two oil cans in which bricks are placed and connected to the old stove flue. “Flames would roar fiercely through the flue while melted blubber dribbled out and ran down the front of the range. At the same time black, oily smoke would permeate every nook and cranny in the hut. As the months passed everything became covered with this black deposit … the absence of soap was felt most acutely.” [R.W. Richards]

Dimitri and Mears around the blubber stove, November 1911

Sub-Antarctic Maquarie Island, February 29, 2020

This month's photo is rather delayed, as Anne and I only recently returned from a spectacular month-long voyage to the Ross Sea and the sub-Antarctic Islands of New Zealand and Australia. We flew back from New Zealand only days before travel restrictions came into force in response to the coronavirus pandemic, and we are now self-isolated at home. Quite a change from travelling to some of the most remote and least visited places on the planet to being hunkered down in our house! I do at least have >10,000 photos from the trip to edit and keep me occupied.

When venturing outside to walk our dogs we adhere to the 6 feet rule, keeping that distance from other humans to avoid airborne viral spread. In Antarctic regions a 15 feet rule applies, not to avoid fellow travellers, but to avoid disturbing the wildlife. But that applies only to you. The wildlife - penguins in particular - don't know about it, and if you sit quietly will often come up to investigate and even gently peck at you.

My photo this month features royal penguins, a near-threatened species whose only home is Maquarie Island, a World Heritage Site located about mid-way between New Zealand and Antarctica. We visited the island en route back from the Ross Sea and landed by Zodiac on a black sand beach, close to a royal penguin colony higher up on the hillside. As they returning from feeding in the the ocean the penguins walked (waddled!) along the beach to access a creek leading up to their colony. I hiked up to the colony, but this did not look promising for photography being densely packed and very messy with penguin poop, so I returned to the beach and sat down alongside a huddle of penguins preening on their way back to their creek-bed highway. The royals were not as inquisitive as the king penguins with which they shared the beach, but seemed quite oblivious to my presence.

Other inhabitants on the beach included a harem of female southern elephant seals at the edge of the tussak grass slope, guarded by an enormous bull elephant seal. I kept a wary eye on him, as these two ton mounds of blubber can move deceptively quickly, without regard for what may be in their path. All was quiet in the harem until a second bull heaved out of the surf, and headed up the beach with the clear intent of challenging for dominance. I grabbed my camera bag with one hand ready to flee, although I guessed I was well out of his path. On the other hand the royal penguins (though, curiously not a lone king penguin in their midst) clearly though otherwise, and stampeded madly around me. I take it as some indication that I am a true photographer that I retained enough composure to take several shots with the camera clutched in my other hand.

Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge; January 2nd 2020

Camera height is often a critical aspect in composing a picture; particularly for determining the relationship between close foreground objects and distant background. Probably >99% of all photos taken (including smart phone shots!) are shot with the camera at eye level while standing. That obviously imparts a certain sameness, as the photographs replicate what you would ordinarily see. Changing that perspective can have a dramatic effectt.

Wildlife photography is a good example, where shooting from near ground level has multiple advantages. For small birds and animals it puts the viewpoint at their eye level, giving more intimacy and drama -; like a toddler among adults. Moreover it is a good way to cut out foreground clutter and simplify composition, making the subject stands out against the background.

Often, however, there are obstacles to achieving a really low viewpoint. Access in wildlife refuges is tightly regulated, being restricted to defined roads and trails that are often elevated above the level of the surrounding fields and ponds. That is generally the case at Bosque del Apache where this month's photo was taken. Although a workaround is to use a long lens with distant subjects to achieve a fairly low angle of view, the result is never quite satisfying. One exception is by the 'Flight Deck' pond - not on the elevated Flight Deck platform itself, but further around where the birds often congregate at the northern, shallow end of the pond. There it is possible to approach close to the edge of the water.

I took the photo above about half an hour before sunset while waiting for flocks of snow geese to fly in to spend the night on the water safe from terrestrial predators. Although the pond was largely empty, two sandhill cranes were feeding in shallow water, making excellent potential subjects to frame against the trees at the far side of the pond that were catching warm light from the low sun. An eye-level view was marred by vegetation, and the from that angle the birds were silhouetted in front of ugly mudflats, rather against than the glowing trees. The solution was to get down very low - indeed, with the camera and lens hood resting on the ground. That viewpoint completely eliminated the messy distractions and placed the cranes directly before a clean, colorful background, which was rendered well out of focus by the long (400 mm plus 1.4x TC) lens I was using. Because the cranes were in shadow they appeared quite dark in contrast to the brght trees. A bit of fill flash would have helped, but I did not have one with me, and some judicious shadow lightening in Photoshop did the trick instead.

A camera with a flip-up live-view screen would also have been nice, but Canon don't see fit to put these these on their 'pro' models, so I had to lay down flat on the wet shoreline to squint through the viewfinder. As a result I had a wet, cold, and muddy bottom, but that was a minor discomfort to capture a nice image, and easily rectified when we got back to our motel. By contrast, one of my favorite low angle shots of penguins in Antarctica involved lying down in penguin poo. Given the lack of laundry facilities on our boat to wash my smelly, green-striped parka and the small cabin shared with my wife, I was not popular for several days after...

Sequoia National Park; December 25th, 2019

Anne was working again at the children's hospital in Fresno, so I drove up to spend a few days over Christmas with her. My timing was good, as the day after I arrived a strong winter storm passed through Southern California, dumping snow on the Tejone pass and closing the interstate freeway I had just travelled. Although more concentrated to the south, the storm also brought snow to the Sierra Nevada mountains, within day-trip distance from Fresno.

My photo this month was taken on Christmas day in Sequoia National Park, close to the General Sherman tree; the largest known living tree on earth. Even though I was there two days after the storm the trees were still heavily draped with snow. Driving up into the mountains was indeed like entering a winter wonderland. With 4wd and snow tires I could happily pass the chain-up pullouts on the icy road, and for traction on my feet my Arctic Muckboots made it easy to explore the sequoia groves away from cleared or trodden paths and find solitude away from the surprisingly busy crowds near the parking lot. The weather conditions rapidly fluctuated, sometimes blue sky and sunshine then overcast as low clouds enveloped the trees, making for an interesting variety of photographic opportunities.

The periods of sunshine sometimes caused enough melting that a tree - infrequently a sequoia but more often a smaller conifer - would shed its accumulated load of snow, creating a small avalanche. I hoped to capture this happening behind one of the sequoias, to make a photo with more drama and where the deep red trunk would be better isolated as the main subject against a white background. Helpfully, the onset of each snow-shedding was accompanied by a loud thump, giving a second or two advance notice to look around and point my camera before the snow hit the gound. In anticipation I had preset the exposure compensation to +1.5 stops to adjust for a white background, and set high speed motor drive mode. Of course, with such random events there was no way to predict where to stand for a good composition. I ended with many shots of snow falling among the nondescript conifers, and once directly on my head! But perseverence paid off, and after a few hopeful hours I was able to get the shot pictured above. This is selected from a continuous sequence, chosen when snow was still falling, but had hit the ground to billow up around the trunk of the sequoia. By eye, and in the unprocessed image file, the falling snow appeared almost uniformly white. However, I found the 'dehaze' slider in Photoshop was very effective to selectively reveal details of the embedded swirls. The trunk almost obscured by the snow is that of the General Sherman tree: my subject is it smaller (unnamed?) neighbor.

Pacific sea nettle jelly (Chrysaora fuscescens). Aquarium of the Pacific, Long Beach. November 22nd 2019

Our son and daughter-in-law were in town for a few days, and we took a trip with them to the aquarium at Long Beach. From previous visits I remembered they had nice displays of jellyfish, so decided to take a camera. Which one, and what lens might be best for jellies? I took my new Canon M5 not wanting the weight and bulk of an SLR, and fitted the little 22mm 'pancake' lens, anticipating that its relatively wide aperture would be better for photographing in dim light than the kit zom lens.

The aquarium has several circular tanks for jellyfish (circular so the jellies can't get stuck incorners), each containg a different, single species. All are beautifully illuminated, with lights at the top to side-light the jellies so they stand out against pure blue or black backgrounds. Nevertheless, the lighting is fairly dim, andI found I was having to carefully balance shutter speed, lens aperture and ISO settings to get good shots. The jellies are constantly moving, necessitating a shutter speed of at least 1/100 sec, and I did not want to push the ISO beyond 1600 to minimize noise. That meant using the lens wide open (f2) to get a good exposure, but then the depth of field was rather narrow. My solution was just to take a lot of shots, trying to time them when a jelly was relatively stationary, and oriented so its body and tail lay within the plane of sharp focus, and positioned without any other jellies to obscure the background. Another issue was avoiding reflections from the walls of the tanks. The jellyfish exhibits are in darkened rooms, which greatly mitigates the problem, but I did have trouble with reflections from illuminated tanks on the opposite side. Usually I could block these by positioning my body behind the camera, but an idea for a future visit would be to cut out a black cardboard mask to fit as a giant lens hood.

The sea nettle jellies were my favorites among the species in the aquarium, with their long, diphanous tails catching the light to look very much like smoke trails. My subject here excelled by doing a slow back-flip while staying in sharp focus and centered in the camera frame.

Volcanic Tablelands, Bishop, California. November 24, 2018

The volcanic tuff of the Tableland above Bishop, California has served for thousands of years as a canvas on which native Americans have drawn striking petroglyphs. Numerous petroglyphs can be viewed at several. well-known, sites along Fish Slough road at the eastern edge of the tableland. But the best petroglyphs are hidden a few miles away deep in the heart of the tableland itself. To date these remain 'secret'. They are not publicized, but although there have been active efforts to stop information about their whereabouts spreading on the Web, it can only be a matter of time before their locations become widely known. Whatever, I am not telling where they are!

I had photographed Sky Rock petroglyph several years ago, but at the time was unaware it had a close neighbor, named the "Thirteen Moons" petroglyph. On a recent visit, Thirteen Moons was my main objective. I knew it was quite close to Sky Rock and quickly found it after searching in fading light after sunset. The small photo below at left is a quick snapshot, showing where the name originates. Beyond a large anthropomorphic figure, the main features are thirteen large circles - interpreted as representing the moons during a lunar year, but as there are also two smaller circles it depends on how you count...

Photographing petroglyphs has been likened to photographing wallpaper. I beg to differ, as there is the possibility to add something extra beyond a straight documentary shot of the original artist's work. As it happened, we arrived on the night of a full moon, so I had hopes of somehow creating an image that would somehow convey a lunar aspect along with the petroglyph itself.

A problem lay in the orientation of the flat rock face on which the petroglyph Is inscribed. This faceS due south, while the rising moon to the east was shadowed by a cliff of tumbled volcanic boulders. Using direct moonlight as illumination was not going to work, and in any case would have given a harsh, flat lighting. Selective lightpainting with a small flashlight to highlight the petroglyph was an obvious solution, and the middle photo below shows my first effort. Better than a snapshot, but too harsh and even, and the LED flashlight I was using gave an excessively blue/white illumination. To fix that I tried reflecting the flashlight beam from my tan colored T shirt, and by forming a tunnel with my dark pile jacket I could steer a narrow beam to spotlight the petroglyph. That gave much better results (photo below on right). And, fortutiously, a few clouds started to drift across, catching the moonlight while the surrounding rocks were in shadow, and creating dramatic diagonal streaks over the sky during the long exposure for lightpainting. Not something I had planned, but serendipitous, so now I had a way to incorporate a lunar element into my shots of the petroglyph.

Looking at the camera screen I was quite happy with the photo shown below, but I did wonder whether it was too abstracted, comprising just the petroglyph rock and sky and failing to convey a sense of environment. Walking back to our campsite I turned around and realized that maybe a wider shot would work better to place the petroglyph in context of the scattered boulders in the cliff and the wide night sky. To capture my photo above then required a little gymnastics. After aligning my camera on the tripod I set it to begin a two minute exposure following a 10 second delay. To illuminate the petroglyph I needed to clambered up the rocks after pressing the shutter button, and get in place within an alcove between the boulders from where I could lightpaint while remaining out of sight of the camera lens.

Chacabuco Valley, Parque Patagonia, Chile; November 1st 2018.

The essential elements of a photograph are the subject and the light.  You can make a good photograph with an interesting subject in mediocre light, and vice versa, but a great photograph really needs both to be exceptional. In the case of this month’s photo I began with superb subjects, a flock of threatened Chilean flamingos that make their home in a shallow lake in the Chacabuco Velley of Patagonia.

The trouble was that the flamingos were too far away. I had anticipated that photography on this trip to Chile would be mostly landscapes, rather than wildlife, and the longest lens I brought (400 mm) wasn’t giving enough reach on a full-frame body. Compounding this, flamingos are timid birds, and my previous attempts to get close had resulted in them slowly, but purposefully moving away. The best I could manage was to walk toward the lake while hidden behind a low ridge, then crouch and crawl down to the muddy shore without causing any disturbance. Even then the closest flamingos were far away, feeding by the opposite shore; too distant for shots of individuals, although the flock just nicely filled the width of the camera frame.

Initially the light was rather flat, but because of the unusual alignment of the Chabuco Valley that cuts east-west through the Andes, the setting sun began to cast a shaft of light between the mountains and across the lake. The background lakeshore and hills went into deep shade, while the light became progressively warmer, highlighting glowing red feathers on the flamingos. They looked spectacular through the viewfinder, yet I knew the resulting image would marred because the flock of flamingos constituted only a thin horizontal strip, with almost black expanses above and below. A solution occurred to me when I noticed reflections of the birds in the calm water. Maybe I could make the photograph as much about the reflections as the birds themselves? An immediate problem, though, was that I was lying down on the shore, both to avoid startling the flamingos, and to get a low angle on them. Usually being at the level of the subject gives a better perspective for wildlife photos, but in this case it meant that the reflections were short and attenuated. I needed to get higher.  Standing up with creaky knees on a muddy beach, while avoiding any abrupt moves was a little painful, but I managed it without disturbing the flamingos, and moved back a little to further reassure them and to gain more height. That did the trick. The elongated reflections now filled in the blank area of the frame and provided their own interest.

That left one remaining issue to deal with. Flamingos largely spend their lives filter feeding through their upside-down beaks. At any given time most or all of the birds in my flock were heads-down in the water – not presenting their most attractive portrait. Thus, I took several shots when a flamingo did look up to, and blended a few instances of ‘heads-up’ birds within the final image you see here.

Parque Patagonia, Chile, November 1st 2018

While journeying along the southern section of the Carretera Austral in Patagonian Chile, Anne and I detoured to spend two days in Parque Patagonia. This was established as a national park only in January this year, formed by incorporating two exising nature reserves together with a cattle and sheep esrtancia in the Chacabuco Valley purchased by Kris Tompkins and gifted to the Chilean government. Parque Patagonia must rank among the World's top national parks, with an area exceeding that of Yellowstone and Yosemite combined. Yet, during our stay - off season and in the infancy of the park before it has become internationally known - the park was entrancingly devoid of visitors. We stayed in two campgrounds, including the one at the park headquarters, and had these entirely to ourselves. Quite literally, we saw a hundred-times more guanacos than people.

Kris Tompkins recounts that "When I drove through the Chacabuco Valley for the first time, I saw the extra-high ‘guanaco fences’ designed to keep these first-rate jumpers out of the best bottom grasslands, which were reserved for the cattle on the estancia. My eyes glazed over looking out on the tens of thousands of sheep grazing the bunch grasses up and down the valley. The grasses looked patchy and dead. Nothing left for wildlife. Previously one of the most biologically rich areas of Patagonia, the Chacabuco Valley was a sea of sheep and cattle. Not a guanaco to be found among them." In 2004, Conservacion Patagonica purchased the 174,500-acre Estancia Valle Chacabuco and set about improving the odds for wildlife through selling off livestock, taking down fences, restoring grasslands and forests, and developing species-specific restoration programs. The success of that program is now evident. To my eye the vast valley looked pristine, with guanaco grazing everywhere.

For much of the time guanacos seem to live a sedate life, grazing alone or in small herds, or lying among the grasses to languidly chew the cud. But, we were there at the start of the mating season, when things sometimes got a lot more frisky. Males become territorial at 4 to 6 years old, and thereafter they engage in violent competition to establish residence in feeding territories and control of family groups. Although guanacos are not sexually dimorphic in body size, males have significantly enlarged canines, which they use in intense, frequently injurious male–male fights that include include spitting; threatening displays; chasing and fleeing; biting at the legs, hindquarters, and necks of their opponents; ramming chests; and neck wrestling. [Click HERE for a BBC video] The members of one particular herd with territory near the park entrance were particularly prone to engage in fights. I was able to photograph many examples of these behaviors over two days, usually positioning myself in a small depression to try to catch the guanacos on ridgelines so they would stand out against a clear or well-blurred background.

Some bonus frisky guanoco shots. Those in the rightmost photo looked to be showing affection, not agressive behavior. Maybe a male-female pair?

Å, Lofoten Islands, Norway; September 6th

A fun photo of the aurora borealis above a fishing village in the Lofoten Islands.

Prospects for auroral displays weren't great during our recent visit to the Lofoten Islands. The Kp solar activity index was holding steady at a mere 2 ('low'), the moon was up for much of the night, and in September at a latitude north of the Arctic circle there is technically no 'night', just astronomical twighlight. But we were there, and it's always worth trying, so I set my iPod alarm to 2:00am each morning. If I could see stars through the window, that was enough encouragement to get dressed and head out of the door of our rorbu. I took my camera fitted with 11mm super-wide lens to capture a full sweep of the sky, and used it to decide whether to go back to bed or stay out until the first light of dawn. Although it could be difficult to discern faint auroral displays by eye against lights from the surrounding rorbu and the moon, a 30s exposure with the camera pointed straight up quickly revealed any band of green across the sky.

My aim in photographing aurorae is to place them as backdrop against an interesting foreground. My camera screen showed a nice green glow on our third night on the islands, so I passed up the temptation of a warm bed and wandered out in search of good auroral alignments with terrestrial subjects. My first choice was the nearby lake at Sørvågen. I scrambled down to the beach by flashlight, and set my tripod low down, hoping to maximize reflections of the aurora in the still water. But no luck: the skies remained quiet during an hour waiting by the lake. There is always a question of how long to wait at a location or try somewhere new when getting a good photo depends on unpredictable phenomena like aurorae. In this case I was getting chilled (though the temperature was actually much milder than might be expected in the middle of the night north of the Arctic circlel) and a brisk walk seemed like a good idea. From Sørvågen it was only a mile to walk down to the very end of the road through the Lofoten islands at the tiny fishing village of Å (appropriately named as the last letter of the Norwegian alphabet). With reflections still in mind I walked round the harbour and just as the sky came to life I found this guy - the village greeter bearing dried stockfish on each arm. Thinking that aurora was likely to be transitory I was in a hurry to set up for a long exposure shot, a fiddly task in this instance because with a really wide lens the foreground subject needs to be surprisingly close to the camera and movements of only an inch make a big difference in the composition. My lightweight travel tripod offered only just enough extension to frame the shot as I wanted, with the greeter positioned against the aurora and without obscuring the harbour buildings; and with a stockfish conveniently placed to block direct light from the recently risen crescent moon.

Tind, Lofoten Islands, Arctic Norway; September 4th

This month's photo continues a geometric theme of semicircles from last month; but now an aetherial rainbow rather than the solid brickwork of a canal tunnel.

Anne and I travelled to the Lofoten Islands via a rather circuitous route through Chicago, Helsinki, Oslo, and Tromso before arriving at the small airport on the islands at Lekness. The weather was bad on the approach to Lekness, with clouds down to ground level, and the pilot needed two attempts to get our little turboprop safely down on the runway. Then we had a 60km drive through pouring rain to our rented rorbu (fisherman's cabin), almost at the end of the road along the islands. We arrived late in the evening, after 5 flight legs (with which our baggage failed to keep up), having left home at 5:00 am the previous day.

Our main occupation the next day involved sleep, but the following morning jet-lag woke me early and I set off with my camera to explore the area around our rorbu (situated in front of the big mountain in the photo). To get a better feel of the geography I walked around to the neighboring village of Sørvågen, which lies on a peninsula on the opposite side of the bay. By then the sun had risen, and was casting nice light on the mountains, contrasting with lingering clouds from the storm that was finally clearing. A faint rainbow started to appear, and anticipating that it would be fleeting I ran down through the houses to get a clear view by the water's edge. In fact there was no need to hurry, as the original fragment grew into a full arc, forming a perfect semicircle with the sun just over the horizon. Even better, from my position the semicircle perfectly framed the succession of mountains

I had brought only a 24-105mm lens with me, and at the wide end this was barely enough to encompass the entire rainbow. To create a more expansive photo I took several overlapping panoramic shots in portrait orientation to stitch together to produce the final image. I regretted not having thought to bring a polarizing filter to accentuate the colors of the rainbow, but it was bright enough by itself to not need artifactual enhancement.

Thus, another one of those 'keeper' photos that involve a little planning, but mostly just being in the right place at the right time.

England, July, 2018

The Harecastle tunnel is a canal tunnel on the Trent and Mersey canal in Staffordshire between Kidsgrove and Tunstall. It comprises two separate and parallel tunnels described as "Brindley" and the later "Telford" after the engineers who constructed them, but only the Telford tunnel remains in use. The tunnel was built to transport coal to heat the kilns in theStaffordshire Potteries. At 1.5 miles it was once one of the longest canal tunnels in Britain. Commercial use declined in the 1960s and the tunnel was closed during the 1970s as a result of subsidence, but following the growth of recreational use of the British canal systems was repaired and reopened.

On a recent family vacation we rented a narrowboat for a week from Andersen Boats at Middlewich, and set out on an out-and-back journey along the Trent & Mersey and Caldon canals. That itinerary took us on passages in each direction through the Harecastle tunnel; a somewhat spooky experience ( the "scarecastle" tunnel) and indeed not without danger, with a fatality in recent years. The tunnel is completely dark and dripping wet in places, and excitement mounts as you venture deeper into the tunnel as its diameter decreases to the point that the skipper, standing at the tiller, barely clears the roof.

With two passages through the tunnel I had time to plan and refine how I might photograph within the tunnel. My original thought was that it would be very dark, so I would need the widest aperture lens I had (a 50 mm, f1.4) to get a shutter speed fast enough to freeze motion - even though the top speed of the boat was only about 3 mph. However, reviewing my shots after we emeerged at the far end of the tunnel I found that did not work very well. One problem was that the only light came from the headlamp at the front of the boat. I had expected that this would illuminate the way ahead, like the headlights of a car. Instead, the light was deliberately aimed upward at the roof immediately in front of the bow to provide an aiming spot for the skipper steering from the stern 70 ft behind. Given the relatively small field of view of a 50mm lens I was photographing this bright spot, and although I got some sharp shots of dripping brickwork and little stalagtites, the results were not very interesting.

On the return journey I decided to try a different approach; to use a superwide 14 mm lens to encompass the a wide sweep, and to turn its more limited (f 2.8) light-gathering power to advantage by taking longer exposure photos creating a motion-blur effect. I set my camera on a low tripod to get a sharp image of the prow of the boat and distant parts of the tunnel, while letting the closer walls blur out with a shutter speeds around 1/4s as we gently passed by. I was surprised at how much the lining of the tunnel varies along its length, with sections of brickwork, dark rock and white-streaked sediments, so I just kept taking shots without knowing at the time what might come out.

My final selection is a shot from part of the tunnel lined with alternating patches of clean red and white brickwork. This smeared out with motion blur to give powerful leading lines converging to the literal 'light at the end of the tunnel'. To generate the final image I needed to do some heavy-handed processing in Photoshop (with black level and shadows sliders maxed out) to bring up the very dim sides of the tunnel and balance them with the much brigher overhead spot illuminated by the headlight.

Svalbard, June, 2018

Anne and I returned a few weeks ago from a trip to Svalbard with NozoMojo: at 80 degrees north and only about 700 miles from the Pole, this was our new furthest north (excepting an Emirates flight from Dubai to LA that crossed almost exactly over the North Pole, but that does not really count). My first impressions of Svalbard were of a rather barren landscape, in marked contrast to Antarctica and sub-Antarctic islands. Rather than being greeted by thousands of penguins and elephant seals, the wildlife took a lot more finding. Nevertheless, diligent binocular scanning by our leaders, Morten and Nozomi found us the classic fauna of the far north; polar bears, walrus, whales, reindeer, seals... But, wildlife photos can wait to be featured another month. For this month's selection I chose a small-scale image abstracted from the side of a little iceberg.

During almost our entire voyage we had 100% cloud cover at the level of the mountain tops, so there was no dramatic light. Instead, I was on the lookout for interesting shapes and compositions, and for splashes of color in a largely monochrome grey landscape. Icebergs calved from glaciers in several of the fjords we visited ticked those boxes, and I was particularly taken by the berg featured here, which had been eroded by wave action to create deep, dark blue caverns at sea level.

Photography from a Zodiac is problematic, with the flat-bottomed boat bouncing on the waves and swinging around so someone's head blocks the view just as you have the shot framed nicely. The image here, in fact, is a merge of two shots, each of which captured a different half of the composition I envisaged. The end result owes quite a lot to post-processing in Photoshop to enhance the contrast and color and emphasize the shapes and textures, but then I regard it as more an abstract creation than a depiction of reality. Indeed, I perceive an optical illusion when I look at the photo. Sometimes I see a three dimensional view of pillars of ice in front of dark caverns: other times the image flattens into two dimensions and I just see triangular and rounded shapes, with the dark areas reminding me of Anasazi pottery.

Do you also perceive this illusion??

Látrabjarg bird cliffs, Iceland. May 29, 2018

A photo that makes a nice contrast to my previous photo-of-the-month featuring jumping penguins. Puffins and penguins are both iconic birds with black and white bodies and colorful bills; both are better adapted for water than land or air; however, whereas they both inhabit circumpolar regions, they differ in living in opposite hemispheres.

With a possibly over-hectic schedule Anne and I have traveled to both sub-Antarctic and Arctic islands within the last year. Taking advantage of an IcelandAir stopover en-route to a recent trip to Svalbard we spent a few days detouring to the Westfjords, now our favorite wild region of Iceland, free of the throngs of tourists overrunning the Golden Circle and south coast. The weather was wet and overcast during the long drive from Reykjavik, and the forecast not much better for our first day at Patreksfjörður at the very tip of the Westfjords. But the morning showed a few patches of blue sky, and we drove off sploshing through puddles in the potholed gravel road to the Látrabjarg cliffs, the highest sea cliffs in Europe and summer home to millions of nesting birds. By the time we reached the parking area by the lighthouse the sun was shining, and I hiked up the trail that follows the cliff edge for 14 km, giving stupendous views as the cliffs gradually rise to a height of over 400 m.

Peering over the cliffs to see the birds is a precarious exercise, with signs warning of the danger of puffin burrows undermining the grassy lip. I followed the recommended practice of wriggling gingerly forward on my tummy to better distribute my weight . The best spot I found was a serrated section of ridge about 1 km from the lighthouse that offered viewpoints where it was possible to look across to birds on the cliff face, rather than looking directly down on them. Kittiwakes and guillemots were present in vast numbers, but I had more trouble with puffins, who were only just beginning to arrive.

I found the subject of this month's photo hiding at the back of a small rock cave, a little below the cliff edge. I could get a good angle almost horizontally across, and the dark recess promised a good picture with a black background against which to highlight the puffin and show off its red bill and feet to good effect. For a long time it sat motionless, but a grassy hollow made a nice bed to lie on and a convienient tussock offered a stabilizing rest for the camera, so I could wait comfortably for some action and was ready to hit the motor drive when the puffin finally launched into space. This is my favorite frame from the sequence, capturing the instant of committment from land to air. This must be a moment of either teror or exilharation for puffins, as their small wings are better suited to swimming than flying, and their initial trajectory is a nose-dive free-fall until frantic flapping can gain some lift and airspeed.

Saint Andrews Bay, South Georgia. October 5th, 2017.

Saint Andrews Bay is undoubtedly the 'Crown Jewel' of Soutrh Georgia, having perhaps the greatest concentration of wildlife on earth; vast colonies of king penguins stretching inland from the beach, around a glacial lagoon and up into the surrounding moraine hills, together with southern elephant seals packed onto every square inch of the beach itself. The bay is about two miles long and being open to the ocean is subject to high surf. For that reason, and because of the sheer density of elephant seals, Zodiac landing craft usually beach at the nothern corner of the bay, where the shoreline abruptly curves around to give more sheltered waters. The natural reaction of visitors is to head off from there toward the main panguin colonies. But there are some interesting secrets in the other direction, following the rocky shoreline to where a narrow cleft splitting the cliffs isolates what is almost a small island. Sooty albatross may be found nesting high up among the tussacks, and a low rock shelf above the ocean is used as a highway by the penguins.

All day long, processions of king penguins journey along this rock shelf, some venturing out from the colony to fish, and others returning home from the ocean. Arriving at the cleft where a narrow channel interrupts their highway the penguins appear surprisingly perplexed about what seems a minor difficulty. For creatures that are so elegant in their natural marine environment they are remarkably reluctant to jump down a few feet into the water and swim across the gap. The long, single file processions bunch up into a huddle of maybe a hundred penguins, with those at the edge peering nervously into the water. Maybe there is a leopard seal lurking down there?? This stasis can last several minutes, with a lot of pushing and shoving, advances and strategic retreats, until eventually one penguin jumps or is pushed off the edge. Once the pioneer is safely across, his compatriots quickly follow, and the channel bcomes a churning spray of flippers and oragge beaks. Penguins never seem to have learned any art of diving and whereas some take a controlled, feet-first leap, many simply do a belly flop of slither down the rock to make a face plant.

Getting to the penguin-jump cleft involves a sometimes perilous trek past aggressive fur seals (take your bodjer stick!), but once there some comfortable rocks away from the penguin highway provide a comfortable seat to watch the entertainment. From a photographic perspective though, the obvious view does not provide any background separation of the jumping penguins from the rocks. To get this photo I timed the swell to wade across the channel toward a vantage point againd the far rock wall.

Page, Arizona:March 22nd, 2018

Horseshoe Bend is one of those iconic locations in the desert Southwest that I had thought never to visit again. Many years ago it felt like it was way out in the wilds, and there was a good chance of being the only person at the viewpoint. Now it is close by a new Walmart, and on a recent visit there were hundreds of selfie-taking tourists around the rim, and a hubbub of construction crews installing observation platforms and safety railings. Not at all a wilderness experience!. In fact, my reason to visit was just to kill some time while Anne used the wi-fi in Page McDonalds for a brief re-connection to the real world.

Yet, Horseshoe Bend is a spectacular feature, and I thought I might as well put some effort into getting a good shot; or rather, a good shot that did not look exactly like the many thousands already posted to the internet. That's not so easy to do. One problem is that it is only possible to capture the entire curve of the Colorado River around its meander from viewpoints along a narrow stretch of the rim, so all views look pretty much the same. Another is that the scene is so vast that a very wide angle lens is needed to 'get it all in'. Finally, the sky was overcast, so there was no dramatic light to be had; though the diffuse illumination did mean I wouldn't have to struggle with deep shadows and harsh contrast. So, equipped with my new Irix 11 mm super-wide lens I wandered along the rim, trying to keep out of the way of everyone's selfies, while looking for a vantage point with foreground features to complement the horeseshoe.

My photo here was taken within a small cleft in the canyon rim that had nice striations in the rock wall. What I wanted was to get the prominent white stripe linde up to match the curve of the river shore, creating a nice sinuous leading line into the picure. That took some wriggling to accomplish.With a very wide lens and close foreground, moving even half an inch produces a big change in alingment. Getting the camera in just the right position was further complicated because - in view of the abrupt 500 ft drop-off - I followed the National Park Service recommendation of gingerly approaching the rim lying flat on my face. I must have been engrossed for several minutes trying to get everything just right, as a passing i-Phone photographer, apparently not comprehending my intentions, remarked "Sir, there's a really nice view just over here".

Saline Valley, California: February 17th, 2018

A recent weekend trip to Saline Valley presented a good opportunity for some nighttime photography. The thin crescent moon set soon after the sun, leaving a dark, completely cloudless sky. Best of all, we were camping close to the saline lake at the bottom of the valley, and I had long wanted to get a photo of both star trails in the sky and their reflections in water.

Achieving this is more difficult than it might seem. The key is that the water surface must be absolutely still, without riples or waves, to give sharp reflections. My previous attempts at Mono Lake had been stymied, because even on windless nights waves still lapped the shore. The saline lake looked more promising, as it is a smaller body of water, and the remains of the long-abandoned salt works trap shallow evaporation ponds by the shoreline. Another requirement to capture both the star circles around Polaris and their reflection is very wide-angle lens. In California the altitude of the north star, Polaris, is about 37 degrees, so allowing for some extra room in the final phot a vertical field of view of at least 90 degrees is needed. For a full-frame 35 mm camera in landscape orientation that corresponds to a focal length of 12mm. No problem, as I brought my new 11mm super-wide Irix lens!

After dinner I hiked by flashlight through the muddy goop around tha lake, and found perfect, crisp reflections, with not a breath of wind. I headed for a location I had scouted earlier in daylight; a long projection of low posts along a dyke that originally formed a boundary of an evaporation pond. It had looked as if this extended nearly due north. With Polaris visible a misalignment was now obvious, but it would have to do. I planted my tripod firmly, checked the lens was wide open at f4 and focused at infinity, and lined up my camera level with the horizon and pointed directly between the the line of posts. Selection of a shutter speed is a comromise - too long and the sky background becomes too bright, yet shorter exposures mean more work in layering numerous frames to produce the final image. In that regard my Canon 5D IV is a little frustrating. It has built-in long exposure ('bulb') and intervalometer settings, but you can't use both simultaneously. Here, I set a 4 minute exposure at ISO 1600, and stood by the camera, slowly sinking into the mud, presing the shutter button immediately after each exposure for a total of 12 shots.

To create the final image I stacked the 12 shots as layers in Photoshop, and blended them together in 'lighten' mode. An unanticipated problem came because I had aligned the camera on the foreground feature, not on Polaris, so the star circles were distorted into ellipses by the wide-angle perspective distortion of the lens. A little tweak with the warp tool took care of that. Finally, I did some some curves adjustments to get a pleasing look in the sky. By eye, the sky on a dark night appears completely black, but with long exposure the camera captures light from several sources; light pollution (minimal at this remote location, the distant lights are from campers at the hot springs), air glow, and scattered starlight from interstellar dust. We might expect the night sky to be blue, as it is in daylight, but that's not the case. This photo represents the true colors of the stars and of the sky background; the latter mostly greens and reds from airglow, generated by the same process that gives rise to the much brighter aurora.

The wooden tower is a relic of the electric tramway constructed in 1911 to carry salt mined from the saline lake 14 miles over the Inyo Mountains to a terminus in the Owens Valley. It operated sporadically from 1913 to 1936, but ultimately proved to be too expensive to run. The tram, which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, was the steepest ever constructed in the U.S. It rose from an elevation of 1100 feet in Saline Valley to 8500 feet over the mountains, and then down to 3600 feet. The route ran south from Salt Lake to Daisy Canyon, steeply up the canyon to the summit crossover station, then southwest to terminate at the (now abandoned) railroad alongside Owens lake.

The diagonal cone of light in the photo is Zodiacal light; a faint, diffuse, and roughly triangular white glow visible in the night sky that appears to extend from the vicinity of the Sun along the ecliptic. Sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust in the zodiacal cloud causes this phenomenon.

Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, January 14, 2018

As a combined Christmas plus birthday present this year Annie generously gave me a new lens, the Canon 400 mm DOII. A true "big white" this features superbly sharp optics and relatively wide (f4) aperture in a remargably compact and light body. To try it out, I took a long weekend trip to Bosque del Apache in the middle of January to photograph the sandhill cranes and snow geese before they departed the Refuge at the end of winter. I came back with a memory card filled with several thousand shots. Looking through these my favorite, pardoxically, was a (deliberately) blurred photo taken with my new, super-sharp lens.

A common view is that a camera merely captures an objective view of the scene before it. Often that is the case, and the photographer's role in creating an interesting image then reduces to carefuly selecting the scene, deciding on the point of view, and hoping for interesting light. A sharp lens obviously does a better job of focusing a sharp image, and there is something of an obsession among photographers about cameras with more megapixels and lenses with better modulation transfer functions. But beyond this, another aspect is that a camera can 'see' things that the eye and brain directly cannot. One example is the freezing of fast motion; another, as illustrated here, is the use of long exposure to generate a blurred sensation of motion.

The center of crane activity during my visit to Bosque was at the ponds alongside the road into the Reserve. In the evening the birds would begin flying in from the fields to land and roost in the pond where they are safe from predation by coyotes duuring the night. They followed a predicable flight path with the prevailing wind, so it was easy to locate a distant bird, lock focus and track it as it descended and flew almost at a right-angle before me to land on the water. Most of the birds came in after sunset, when the light was fading badly. By then I was having to use a shutter speed as long as 1/10 second even at ISO 16000. No chance of getting sharp shots of the fast moving cranes, but a good opportunity to create motion blur photos. With my camera tripod-mounted I tried to smoothly track the path of a crane on its glide path while firing of a burst of motor-drive shots. Very much a hit and mostly miss procedure, as you have no idea at the time about what the camera is capturing. Out of nearly 2000 shots over two evenings I got only three 'keepers' where I had matched the motion of the crane well enough to have the head and eye sharp while the wings were in a position to give a pleasingly abstract blur.

Grytviken, South Georgia: October 4th 2017

The whaling station at Grytviken was founded in 1904 by the Norwegian captain Anton Larsen. At that time whales abounded in Cumberland Bay immediately adjacent to the station, and 195 were taken in the first year of operation without the whalecatcher boats ever needing to leave tha bay. However, over the next decades Grytviken together with the four other whaling stations established on South Georgia following its initial success were substantially responsible for decimating the southern hemisphere's stock of whales. Eventually the whale stocks became so low that continued exploitation was unviable, and the station at Grytviken finally closed in 1966 as the last operating station on the island, having processed 53,761 slaughtered whales into 455,000 tons of oil and 192,000 tons of meat..

The industrial scale machinery for processing the whale oil, blubber, meat and bones remains in a state of rusting decay - protected from vandalism by the remoteness of South Georgia, but not from the ravages of the extreme climate. Originally the machines were enclosed in corrugated metal-sided buildings, which remain largely intact at whaling stations other than Grytviken. However, dangers from collapsing and wind-blown flying sheet metal and asbestos exposure led to those stations being declared off-limits to visitors. Grytviken is the exception, having been cleaned-up and sanitized for the safety of tourists in 2005 by the removal of buildings, asbestos and fuel oil. What remains is an eerie memorial, with the vast extent of the processing plant now open to the elements.

For photographers who visit South Georgia with their minds focused on wildlife, Grytviken may seem something of a desert. But the abstract shapes and rust patterns of the whaling station do make an interesting interlude from penguins and seals. And, Gytviken is a compulsory stop for all vessels visiting South Georgia to clear immigration and customs (a wonderfully informal procedure, performed on our recent visit by two ladies in wooly jumpers, between them representing the entire government of the British Overseas Territory). Whereas cruise ships have to anchor out in the bay and ferry their passengers ashore in Zodiacs, in the much smaller Hans Hansson we were able to moor at the dock in the heart of Grytviken. That greatly enhanced our time ashore, most especially by allowing a unique opportunity for nighttime photography.

This Month's photo was taken at about 2:00am, on a cold, windy night with a light snowfall. The moon was near full, and its diffuse light through an overcast sky dimly illuminated the surrounding mountains as a scene-setting backdrop. To highlight the machinery I used a LED flashlight, walking around durng a 30s exposure to vary the angle so as to avoid any harsh shadows. Nightscapes portray a different emotional 'feel' to more straightforward representational daytime photographs, and I hope this image captures something of the ghosts of the thousands of whales who met their end as oil in the huge storage tanks.

Saint Andrew's Bay, South Georgia: October 14th 2017

Saint Andrews Bay has good claim to be among the top - if not THE top- wildlife photography destination on the planet. From late spring in the southern hemisphere the beach becomes a writhing mass of thousands of elephant seals and, many more thousands of fur seals. But the true highlight lies at the back of the beach, among the moraines where the world's greatest concentration of king penguins gather; some 300,000 adults and juvenile oakum boys. It is not, however, the easiest place to get to, involving a usually rough 800 mile crossing of the South Atlantic from Ushuaia or the Falkland islands to South Georgia. And, when you get to Saint Andrews Bay, landings can be difficult. The bay is open to the ocean and strong winds can kick up suddenly, generating big surf that may preclude landing or prompt a hasty retreat back to the ship. The afternoon before I took this photo the conditions were wild, blowing a near blizzard . Dion, our captain, was confident that he could land us on the beach, but not so confident whether he could pick us up again if the wind showed any strengthening. In the event we had a great time photographing penguins in blowing snow, despite having a hard time to stay upright during stronger gusts. I would actually have rather enjoyed being stranded for the night as there is a well supplied emergency hut, but we were able to board the Zodiac without problem at the more sheltered northern end of the beach.

By daybreak the next morning the weather had changed dramatically, as it is apt to do at South Georgia. The wind had died, the sky was clear, and there was still a dusting of snow on the ground. Conditions looked good for a great morning of photography, and to get in position for good light we landed well before sunrise; one of the many advantages of being on a small boat with only twelve passengers, where schedules can be readily adapted to the conditions without the constraints of large cruise ships. I hiked up to a lake in the center of the penguin colony looking for reflections in the still water, and took this shot just as the first sunlight caught the penguins below the montains. The photo is largely a result of good fortune in being at the right place at the right time, but a matter of perseverence as well as luck. Anne and I have been privileged to have spent over a week in total at Saint Andrews Bay, and this was the only morning with such perfect conditions.

Saint Andrew's Bay, South Georgia: October 6th 2017

This photo was taken only four weeks after my previous photo-of-the-month selection; but some 8000 miles and 120 degrees of latitude away. Anne and I had a crazy travel schedule, flying home to California from Iceland, then onward to the Falkland Islands via Santiago, and finally a four-day small boat crossing of the Southern Ocean to South Georgia. We joined a group of photographers and wildlife experts on a non-commercial charter organized by Chris Fallows, a South African photographe and leading authority on great white sharks. This opportunity came up at the last minute, and we had jumped at the chance to return to one of the top wildlife destinations on the planet, aboard our favorite boat, the Hans Hansson, crewed by Dion Poncet and Juliette Hennequin,

Chris had sheduled the trip very early in the season; early spring in the Southern Hemisphere. At this time huge numbers of elephant seals are hauled out on the beaches and fighting for their right to dominate the beach; albatross are present in good numbers; and penguins are everywhere. And, we were on the island well before any cruise ships begin to visit. Apart from the dozen or so scientists and staff overwintering at the King Edward Point research station our little group of 15 had South Georgia to ourselves, with complete freedom for all-day explorations from our landing beaches. It was wonderful to be utterly off-the-grid for a month, with hundreds of thousands of penguins for company; but it was then an unpleasant jolt to arrive back at LAX and face the traffic on the 405 freeway!

One of Chris' motivations for an early season visit was the expectation of lots of snow and dramatic weather conditions (following Marc Muench's maxim that "bad weather makes for good photographs"). Mostly, that did not come to pass. The South Georgia winter had been exceptionally mild, and beaches where we had found deep snow during a previous November visit were completely bare.We even had several days of warm sunshine. Nevertheless, although the light was often frustratingly flat through much of the day, the skies sometimes cooperated to give spectacular sunrise and sunset opportunities. This month's photo is one example, when the light from the setting sun passing through a window between a lenticular cloud formation and the Allardyce moutains back-illuminated vast numbers of oakum boys (juvenile king penguins).

Oakum boys were named by 19th century sailors for the resemblance of their brown fluffy plumage to the color of oakum (tarred fibre) used to caulk timbers on sailing ships.The year-old penguins in the photo will soon begin to shed their fluffy brown plumage, adopt the colors of an adult, and take to the ocean. Until then they mostly just bide their time huddled in crèches, waiting for their parents to come back and feed them. Although the dull brown of the oakum boys can't compete with the spectacular orange and yellow color palette of the adult king penguin, their plumage does make for great photographs when low sunlight outlines their silhouette with an orange glow.

I took many variations of this scene, mostly excluding the sky and shading the lens with my hand to avoid lens flare. However, the cloud was also part of what made the scene so special, so I also risked some shots straight into the sun. The results were indeed marred by flare artifacts caused by the direct sunlight reflecting between lens elements. So, a job for Photoshop to rescue! An hour's work with clone and content-aware fill tools fixed up the problem areas, and I was able to balance the extreme contrast between the bright sky and dark foreground to create the image featured here.

Skápadalur Valley, Westfjords, Iceland: September 8th 2017

Anne and I were booked on a trip to Greenland, and had flown out to Iceland a few days in advance before joining the onward charter connecting flight. However, in our hotel room in Reykjavik we received an e-mail notifying us that the boat we were to join had mechanical problems, and that the Greenland trip was cancelled. So, we were stranded in Iceland! But that is not at all a bad place to be stuck, and with the wonders of the Internet and trip advisor we were quickly able to rebook our vacation. While visiting Iceland earlier in the year we had been dismayed by how the popular sites around the Golden Circle and south coast had become overrun with tourists, and this time determined to head out in search of solitude. Our destination was the Westfjords; a remote region to the northwest of Iceland connected only by a thin neck of land, far distant from Reyjavk, and traversed by largely unpaved roads twisting around fjords and over high mountain passes. Although lacking in the sort of iconic waterfalls and galciers popular in the rest of Iceland, the Westfords have a haunting, sparse beauty, and we found them mercifully free of tour busses and excursion superjeeps.

Our favorite stay among the fjords was at Patreksfjordur, in part because of our meals at Stukuhsid restaurant, which served the best salmon and rhubarb tart that Anne had ever eaten. After dinner each night we walked back to our guesthouse Stekkaból (also highly recommended) and looked up the aurora forcast from the Icelandic met office. On our second night the forecast looked good, with activity 4 on a 0-9 point scale and a clearing sky after midnight. When photographing the aurora I like to incorporate some terrestrial feature, and the head of Patreksfjord offered an attractive subject in the form of a beached ship, the Garðar. Originally known as the Globe IV, this large ship was built in Norway in 1912 as a state-of-the-art whaling vessel. She found an Icelandic owner following World War II and, once whaling restrictions became more widespread, the Garðar (a name she finally received in 1963) was used for fishing herring in the waters off of Iceland. After decades in faithful service the Garðar BA 64 was finally deemed unsafe in 1981. At that time most disused ships were scuttled, but instead the Garðar was run aground in Skápadalur Valley, where she now lies stranded and rusting on the beach.

Rising from our bed at 2:00 am there were streaks of green in the sky, clearly visible even though the moon was near full. We drove down to the Garðar and I set up my tripod to explore the use of my new, superwide 11 mm Irix lens for capturing vast swathes of the sky. For two hours the auroral displays flickered over the Garðar, alternating between one side and the other, so I found mysef dashing around with the camera mounted on my tripod to get good compositions. The moonlight was bright enough to give a good exposure of the land and the ship, and sometimes I supplemented this with lightpainting. Most of the time I stayed on the beach immediately next to the ship (things start to look very small with an 11mm lens when you move only a short distance away!), but then I thought to walk around a small lagoon in the hope of getting reflections of the aurora in the still water. This month's photo is the result, and the only shot I got of the reflections as the aurora faded immediately afterward, and the attractions of a warm bed overcame my patience before it might reappear.

The next night the aurora forcast was a level 9 (extreme!), and we set off back to the Garðar with high hopes and bright green glimmers behind high clouds. Arriving at the ship there were curtains of light in the clearing sky, but they faded before I even had time to set up my camera, and never reappeared...

Malheur National Forest, Oregon, August 21 2017
44 33 18N 119 18 50 W; 17:23UT; Alt 43.2, Azi 121.9

I have driven 1000 miles to photograph a shadow of one rock formation on another, so it definitely seemed worthwhile to drive a similar distance to view and photograph a much bigger shadow; that cast by the moon during a total solar eclipse.

Now, a problem is that only truly dedicated landscape photographers get excited about shadows on rocks, whereas millions of people get excited about a solar eclipse, particularly one that conveniently crosses the entire USA. An important part of my planning was thus to choose a location that might be reasonably secluded and free of traffic jams. From our home in southern California a swath of the eclipse path from the Oregon coast across Idaho lay within about the same driving distance. Eastern Oregon looked the best bet for clear skies, and searching on Xavier Jubier's wonderful interactive eclipse map I found a promising forestry road that lay almost exactly on, and paralleled the center line of the eclipse. Anne and I arrived there two days after leaving home, camping (and photographing) along the way at Mono Lake and Steen's Mountain. Many of the best clearings in the forest were already occupied, but we eventually found an excellent wide open area, with even a pond to try for reflection shots of the eclipse. A family with eight children were already there, but they had set up among the trees at the far side of the clearing, and the kids were remarkably well behaved, so we still had relative solitude.

I was using a tracking mount for telephoto shots of the eclipse, and had hoped to align it to Polaris the night before the eclipse. However, clouds moved over the sky, obscuring the stars and increasing worries as to whether the eclipse would be visible. Waking at about 2 am I could see the Milky Way (we were out in our sleeping bags on the gound) and wriggled out dressed only in boxer shorts to position the tripod. At dawn the sky remained clear, if a little hazy with smoke from the distant Sisters fire, so all looked good for the eclipse.

I was using two cameras; the first a Canon 7D Mk2 with 10 mm lens to create a wide-angle landscape view of a time-lapse series as the sun rose and became eclipsed. By checking the sun's path the day before I found the the lens was just wide enough in portrait orientation to capture both the eclipsed sun, quite high in the sky, and its reflection in the pond. I pre-programmed the camera to take shots every 10 min, with the exposure set appropriately for the pair of stacked ND filters I was using as a solar filter. My second camera was a 5D MkIV, with 400 mm lens, 1.4x teleconverter and solar filter, fitted to the now-aligned tracking mount. I had that one pre-programmed with three settings; 10 min interval timer with solar filter on, 1 second intervals with three exposure brackets to capture the diamond ring with the filter off, and 1 second exposures covering an enormous 10 stop range with the filter off to capture the solar corona during totality. A bit complicated, but it all worked, and once totality began the camera took care of itself so I could enjoy the experience.

It really is a remarkable coincidence that the diameters of the sun and moon, and the earth's and moons' orbits are such that the moon can exactly shadow the sun. If the moon were slightly smaller we could only get annular eclipses (which are nice, but nothing like a total eclipse). If it were much larger the sky would merely go black during totality - the corona would be greatly obscured, and the diamong ring effect lost.

But when the orbits are just so it is perfect, and quite something to behold. This was my first total eclipse, and I want to see more. Two minutes is too short. Photographs cannot fully encapsulatethe experience, but the montage above will serve as a visual memory, and indeed captures details that were not apparent by eye.

Bolsa Chica: July 2017.

I drove down to Bolsa Chica on Sunday morning for the first time in a couple of months. On my previous visit the lagoon was overrun with Forster's terns. I expected they would now be gone, but the air was still filled with noisy terns diving into the water and squabbling among themselves. Not the same terns though - these looked a little larger. The mystery was solved when I found an article on the internet. As described by Peter Knapp, elegant terns began nesting last summer at Bolsa Chica in numbers never seen before. This can be traced to the failure of their primary nesting site in the Gulf of California, Isla Rasa. This site previously supported 90% of the breeding population, but has had no nesting for the past three years. Therefore, the site at Bolsa Chica and the Salt Works in San Diego have accommodated a large proportion of the entire breeding population of this species. 

So, a new species for me to photograph, and the sheer density of birds made this surprisingly easy. I had tried many times before to capture terns in the instant of diving into the water, but the Forster's were always too fast for my reaction time. The elegant terns seemed a little more deliberate, giving more notice of when they were about to dive. At one point a dozen or more terns engaged in a feeding frenzy conveniently near to the bridge, and it was just a matter of hitting the motor drive to capture them diving and emerging from the water.

Another behavior I had been trying, and failing to photograph was the mid-air 'shake' terns do a short while after they have dived for fish. By eye this is so fast as to be a blur, making it hard to discern quite what the bird is doing. Once again, the speed and erratic flight of the Forster's terns had defeated me, and I never succeeded in tracking a bird and keeping it in focus while it did its shake. To maximize my chances with the elegant terns I walked along the trail to where the tidal flow through a culvert connecting two lagoons churns up the water to create a rich fishing ground. Sure enough there were several terns busy circling and diving close to the path. I concentrated on on grabbing focus on the splash when they entered the water and then follow the bird with motor drive running as it flew off. It took a few hundred shots, but I finally got the photo I wanted.

South Iceland: February 2017.

Gljúfrabúi: I have no idea how to say it, but imagine that when pronounced by an Icelander the sound would convey something of the damp, gloomy atmosphere of this unique little waterfall.

Gljúfrabúi hides close to its much better-known neighbor Seljalandsfoss - the waterfall you can walk behind. During our recent midwinter visit we found Seljalandsfoss, along with most of the other classic destinations along the south coast of Iceland, to be overrun with tourists. Hoping for more solitude I walked the half-mile track along the base of the cliffs to find the outlet stream from Gljúfrabúi. From the path you can't see the waterfall. What makes it special is that it is set back in a narrow canyon, the entrance to which is blocked by a house-size fallen boulder. Getting to the fall involves either a slippery scramble over the boulder, or a wade in icy cold water through a tunnel formed by the boulder. Wearing knee-length muck boots I opted for the latter approach and emerged into a gloomy chamber, illuminated only by a narrow skylight between the boulder and canyon walls, and filled with dense spray from the fall. Very atmospheric, and very wet!

I faced two problems in getting a good photo. The first arose from the constrained space between the boulder and the waterfall - but I had anticipated this and brought a super-wide lens. By setting my tripod low down at the very back of a crevice in the boulder I could hide direct light from the sky behind an overhang, and get a wide view to place the fall in the context of its mossy grotto. Then, the issue was dealing with droplets of spray on the lens. I had a cloth to wipe off water, but even by using this to cover the lens until the very instant before opening the shutter I invariably ended up with a few droplets on the front element during the one second exposure I was using to create an 'angel hair' effect on the fall. As a safeguard I took several shots, and in post-processing blended two shots that were each marred by a single droplet, but in different places.

Bolsa Chica Wetlands; May 13th, 2017

Great blue herons are easy birds to photograph. They are big; they move and fly slowly; and they are not unduly timid. But, most of the time they just don't do very much, although they will stay still and pose elegantly for a photographer. I found this month's subject at the northern end of the wetland preserve, where a channel connects two of the lagoons. A strong tidal flow was passing through the channel, churning up the water and creating a good fishing ground for several terns and pelicans that were busy diving. The heron was taking things in a more leisured manner, perched on a rock by the edge of the channel looking for any fish that might come within easy reach of its long neck. A feature making this particular bird attractive from a photographic perspective was that it was positioned in front of a dark, shaded concrete abutment, while the heron was diffusively, but more brightly illuminated. A white bird against a near black background would give a strong subject isolation and make the photo 'pop'.

I settled down on the bank of the lagoon to wait and see what might happen, soon wishing I had brought a tripod as I could not hand-hold my camera with 100-400 mm lens for more than a couple of minutes without resting. Luckily, I did have the camera to my eye the one instant during a half hour of watching when the heron made a move, transiently swiveling its head around to check out a fish on the opposite side to where it had been looking. It never made a dive for the fish, but the sinuous curve of the neck and back and the splayed feathers made a nice composition. It's always good to get a 'S' curve in a photo!

I did need to do a little Photoshop trickery on the original shot to create the final image, darkening and blurring the background to enhance the contrast. And, I had been positioned a little too low, so that a foreground rock obscured the lower part of the heron's legs. That problem was apparent when I looked at the image on the camera screen, so I took another shot from a higher vantage point immediately afterwards before the bird had moved position anticipating that I could then blend in the legs.,

Temblor Range, Carrizo Plain National Monument; April 9th 2017

Living in Southern California we have been fortunate to have had 'superblooms' the last two winters, when the deserts came alive with carpets of flowers. I have been surprised, though, by how localized the areas of superblooms can be, and how varied they are in timing. In late January of 2016 the floor of Death Valley was already carpeted in yellow, but this year the Death Valley flowers were very modest. Instead, the most spectacular displays were in the hills above Carrizo Plain, but not peaking until mid April.

We made three visits this season to Carrizo Plain. On our first visit in March the tops of the Caliente range were covered in dense fields of hillside daisies, but there was not much other color to be seen apart from the bright yellow. And, we had peace and solitude - Carrizo was staying true to its reputation as the National Monument that nobody knows about. But then the TV news and newspapers started showing photos of spectacular blooms in the Temblor Hills to the east of Carrizo Plain... On our next visit there were people everywhere, driving slowly down the dirt Elkhorn road, kicking up great clouds of dust. Finding the best spots for flowers became the same procedure as searching for lions in Africa; just look for the greatest huddle of vehicles.

I took this photo from the roadside, next to a dense vehicle huddle which, indeed, marked the best display we found; a tricolor palletet of yellow hillside daisies, orange blazing stars and purple tansy phacelia. I used a 400 mm telephoto lens to compress the scene, aiming for a semi-abstract composition of color swatches. This was aided by shadowless light cast by the bright mid-day sun, but the hot sun also degraded the image sharpness owing to the heat haze rising from the hillsides. To provide a focal point and sense of scale I wanted to include some people in the picture, which was easy to do as a hiking trail ran along the top of the yellow ridge in the foreground, and there were lots of hikers. For the final image I cropped out the sky to enhance the abstraction, and compressed the horizontal axis to get a more pleasing angle on the diagonal ridge.

Font's Point, Anza Borrego State Park; March 24th, 2017

Anne and I took a few days off to look for wildflowers during the 'superbloom' resulting from an exceptionally wet winter in Southern California. Our first stop was Anza Borrego State Park, which was receiving a lot of publicity. Actually, we were a little disappointed; the carpet of yellow flowers on the desert floor paled in comparison to what we had seen in Carrizo Plain the week before, and in places the throngs of visitors seemed to almost outnumber the flowers! In search of somewhere quiet to camp for the night we drove up Font's Point wash and along the cut-across trail leading through high, arid badlands, settling on a barren patch of flat ground to set up our tent.

But, on closer inspection, not so barren. Beautiful white desert lilies (hesperocallis undulata) were flowering on the bare soils. My first attempts to photograph them looked terrible, with a distracting background of brown, dessicated earth strewn with rocks. To get a better subject isolation - indeed, to completely eliminate any background - I waited until after dark. A small flashlight, positioned by Anne behind and below the flowers illuminated the petals witha backlightmaking them glow while seemingly suspended in an inky void.

Þingvellir, Iceland. February 21st, 2017

It had been three years since Anne and I had last visited Iceland, and we had looked forward to returning in mid-winter when we could explore in solitude. But, what a change in such a short period of time. The country is experiencing a massive boom in tourism;, possibly underlying an economic bubble that might well be followed by a corresponding crash. The airport is expanding, numerous hotels are under construction, superjeeps clutter the parking lot at Jokulsarlon, and cars and tour buses are everywhere. Tourists visiting Iceland in 2016 outnumbers the population more the sixfold. We were saddened that locations that had previously felt remote and wild were now overrun, as evident in the contrasting photos below of the black beach at Reynisdrangar.

The penultimate night of our visit gave a welcome respite from the crowds. The Icelandic met office forecast was for low cloud cover and a moderate (2/3) level of solar activity, so we woke at 2:00am and set out from our hotel in Reykjavik in search of dark skies and interesting foreground to photograph the aurora.

Þingvellir seemed like a good choice, being far enough from Reykjavik to minimize light pollution, and with an attractive church, interesting rock formations, rivers and lakes to provide a counterpoint to the skies. There had been a light snowfall the previous day, and as I set off down the track from the parking area (now newly equipped with parking meters) I found few footprints in the snow, and was happy to realize that I had the entire National Park to myself for the night.

Once my eyes had adapted I could see a clear, green band of aurora; not spectacular, but bright enough to make good photos without needing a ridiculously high IOSO setting and overly long exposure time. My first destination was the iconic Icelandic church, which is located close to small buildings used as a summerhouse by the Icelandic Prime Minister (compare and contrast with Mar a Lago!). The summerhouse buildings are floodlit, but whereas the church is not, it is gently illuminated by spillover from the floodlights. By happy coincidence the lighting on the church balanced nicely with the brightness of the aurora - a good thing, as I had no control over either of these parameters. If the foreground had been in darkness I could have provided and balanced my own lighting using a flashgun or by 'lightpainting' with a hand-held flashlight, but these approaches tend to give a harsh illumination with distracting shadows. Here, diffuse light reflected from the white walls of the buildings gave a pleasingly even illumination.

Volunteer Lagoon, Falkland Islands; December 2016

Tours to the Falkland Islands often make a visit to the penguin colonies at Volunteer Point on the penultimate day, before returning the short distance to Stanley for the once-a-week flight back to Santiago. On our recent circumnavigation of the Islands we were due to make a zodiac landing at Volunteer Point, but that was precluded by strong winds and high surf as the Point is exposed to the full force of the South Atlantic ocean. Instead, we motored toward the entrance to Volunteer Lagoon, where we landed on a sheltered beach. The tide was low, and from the landing site we could splash across sandbars in the shallow lagoon to find Gentoo, Magellanic and a few King penguins.

I liked the alternating layers of reflective blue water and yellow sand in the lagoon, and experimented using different patterns as backgrounds against which to photograph the penguins.That did not work well, as the sands were just too cluttered and distracting, strewn with clumps of seaweed and debris. My next thought was to use deliberate camera movement to blur the landscape into pelasing stripes by selecting a slow shutter speed and sweeping the camera horizontally during the exposure. After a few trials I seemed to be getting quite nice results as viewed on the camera screen. But, I wanted a penguin in the picture! I spent some time trying to find penguins moving at a good pace so I could pan the camera to keep them in good focus whilst blurring everything else. However, unless they are being chased by a sea lion, penguins don't move very fast on land, and the ones I found certainly were not cooperating by moving at a steady pace. After a while I gave up, and moved on to photographing penguins amidst blowing sand on the dunes.

Ansel Adams coined the term 'previsualization'; meaning to plan and conceptualize what a final photograph woud look like before he actually opened the shutter. In this instance my previsualization had failed. I knew what I wanted to achieve - a sharp image of a penguin against a background blurrred sufficiently to become an almost abstract pattern whilst still conveying an impression of the environment - but I could not capture that in a single shot. A month later, viewing my images on the computer screen, I was struck by a notion of 'postvisualization'. After all, I had nice motion-blurred images of the lagoon, and nice sharp images of penguins in the lagoon. Why not just combine two frames in Photoshop...

Pebble Island, Falkland Islands; December 2016

Anne and I arrived home after Christmas after a return visit to the Falkland Islands - land of penguins and albatross - aboard the MV Hans Hansson. Our voyage was a clockwise circumnavigation of the Falklands, visiting many of the wildlife-rich outlying islands. Pebble Island was our penultimate destination, and on a first morning landing did not impress! We had hiked inland to a large pond in search of waterfowl, but the pond was dry. The Falklands are experiencing a six-year drought, and all that remained was a brown expanse of cracked mud, enlivend only by a dessicated sheep's skull.

The afternoon landing, however, was much more productive. We were dropped off by Zodiac at a different beach on the low side of the island, and hiked across to the opposite side where cliffs drop steeply to the ocean. Several colonies of rockhopper penguins are spaced over a few kilometers along the top of cliffs. I decided to stay at the first colony we found to maximize time with the penguins, whereas others in our small group continued onward. To get to their nesting site from the ocean the rockhoppers needed to first cross an extended rock tidal shelf and then find a way up the steep cliff face. I wanted to get down to the shelf, but at first look that seemed a daunting proposal as the convex slope appeared to steepen abruptly. But, after walking around to the side to get a better view I could see that the rockhoppers had created an elegant highway, switchbacking between ledges up the cliff face. This I decended carefully, with the main hindrance being the need to wait for little groups of penguins to pass by on their journeys to and from the ocean.

Once rockhoppers have acrobatically emerged from the ocean onto land, they seem strangely reluctant to continue on to their colony; stopping to preen or just staying motionless, and sometimes even backtracking. Here, the rock shelf offered a further distraction in the form of a large tidal pool, which they seemd to treat as a play-pool; splashing around, cavorting, sometimes fighting and seeming to thoroughly enjoy themselves. After climbing from the pool the rockoppers would stand at the edge and do a vigorous 'wet-dog' shake to dry themselves; something they do not usually do on emerging from the ocean itself.

So, an interesting and highly photogenic behavior, and some nice lighting by which to capture it. I am a sucker for backlit photos, which can convey a dramatic mood albeit at the expense of technical issues of controling the extreme contrast and likelyhood of lens flare. Large boulders cast most of the pool into shadow while providing a black backround behind rockhoppers standing in sunlight at the near edge. I positioned myself low down, facing directly into the sun aligned with a platform the penguins seemed to favor for drying out, and waited for the action. Once out of the pool,a rockhopper would usually wait a few seconds, then stretch its head up and stick out its flippers before beginning the shake. That gave me plenty of time to frame and focus before triggering a motor-drive burst of shots to capture the spray. This month's photo is taken from the second frame of a sequence, when the most dense spay had begun to fly.

Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon, June 2011.

Continuing this month with an abstract (and Icelandic) theme. This is a photo I took during a night spent wandering along the shores of Jökulsárlónlagoon in the south of Iceland. We had arrived that afternoon, and my initial impression of the famous ice-filled lagoon was of dissappointment; tourists thronged the beach, waiting for noisy amphibious craft to take them out among the icebergs. By late evening though, the scene had changed. Everything was quiet and I had the place to myself as the sun briefly dipped below the horizon. A glacier from the vast Vatnajökull ice cap calves into the lagoon, which is filled with icebergs the size of houses jostling one another as they make their way down to the narrow channel leading to the sea. Close to the shore there are numerous smaller fragemts of ice that become sculpted into sinuous shapes as they melt and roll over so that different surfaces become immersed or exposed to the air. While there was still good light in the sky I concentrated on photographing the wider landscape and large bergs, but during the short arctic midsummer night the nearby ice shards provided subjects for lightpainting with my flashlight.

A request from Annie, my photographic elph, for an abstract Photo of the Month.

Iceland, in winter, can have some wonderful light. It can, and frequently does, also have atrocious weather, with gale force winds skimming snow or rain horizontally above the lava fields. This month's photo was taken on a gloomy December afternoon; not really bad weather, but a gentle rain at a temperature just above freezing under overcast skies. Quite appropriate, actually, for the location, a black volcanic pebble beach on the Snæfellsnes peninsula, but a challenge photographically to capture the mood of black lava agains dark grey cloud. I rather like color!

The only color I could find was in clumps of seaweed washed up on the beach, so I decided to concentrate on those. After sampling several clumps the one I ended up prefering was the least colorful, but I was taken by the bare white stalks contrasting against the blue/black pebbles. After taking several 'straight' shots, I hit on the idea that the spiraling symmetry of the stalks might work well with a zoom blur technique. I set up my tripod with the camera and zoom lens pointed directly downwards and centered on the root of the seaweed. Given the dim light and a polarizing filter to cut the glare off the wet pebbles, an aperture of f 8 gave a shutter speed of several seconds - plenty of time to play with the zoom during the exposure. For the photo above I left the lens at its widest setting for about two thirds of the exposure time, and then zoomed in smoothly, reaching the end of the lens travel just as the shutter closed. Thus, the end result is a sharp image superimposed on a blur of pebbles apparently converging to a vanishing point; imparting a three-dimensional appearance to a flat, two-dimensional subject.

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Although I had the beach to myself on a wet December day, during summer many tourists visit to see the famous 'lifting stones', as shown at the right. From Wikipedia;

"Djúpalónssandur was once home to sixty fishing boats and one of the most prolific fishing villages on the Snæfellsnes peninsula but today the bay is uninhabited. Four lifting stones are in Djúpalónssandur, used by fishermen to test their strength. They are Fullsterkur ("full strength") weighing 154 kg, Hálfsterkur ("half strength") at 100 kg, hálfdrættingur ("weakling") at 54 kg and Amlóði ("Useless") 23 kg. They were traditionally used to qualify men for work on fishing boats, with the Hálfdrættingur being the minimum weight a man would have to lift onto a ledge at hip-height to qualify."

Yes, I know; my photo shows five stones, not four. The fifth was probably added by a useless tourist...

Hydrurga Rocks, Antarctica. December 2015

You have to go down to Antarctica to find chinstrap penguins in the wild; they don't live any further north than that. Chinstraps are entertaining creatures, and I was happy to get this photo that captures them in their environment. Penguins, a Weddell seal and icebergs: what more could you want for an iconic Antarctic photo!

It was the two blue, beached icebergs that first caught my attention, together with the Weddell seal that had conveniently settled for a sleep. Several chinstraps were wandering around from a nearby colony, so I positiond myself to line up the seal between the icebergs and sat down in the snow (waterproof pants are de rigeur in Antarctica!) to see if any might arrange themselves in a pleasing composition. Other than exercising a little patience I can't claim any particular skill for creating the final image.The penguins deserve the credit for arranging themselves in symmetrical pairs, looking toward the lone individual walking between the icebergs. My main contribution was merely to find a viewpoint that gave some clearance to isolate the seal against the snow, while staying low enough to keep a clean background by hiding intruding rocks on the beach below the snow crest.

Vagar, Faroe Islands: July 24, 2016

The island of Vagar is home to both the sole airport of the Faroe Islands and the Faroe's largest lake - the later confusingly known by several names: Letisvatn, Sørvágsvatn and Vatnið. In addition to its convoluted nomenclature, a unique feature of the lake is that its outflow plunges dramatically over a 150 ft basat cliff directly into the Atlantic Ocean. The falls, Bøsdalafossur, were on my list of 'must photograph' locations, but with bad weather on our arrival and pre-booked itinerary I did not get a chance before the last evening before our flight back to Edinburgh. From the airport hotel it was only a drive of a few km along the road running half way alongside the lake to the start of a muddy 45 minute walk along the shoreline to the falls.

Arriving at the end of the lake I could see the water flowing gently out over small cascades in a basalt shelf, before disappearing from view as it plunged vertically into the ocean. A problem, however, was that I coud find nowhere to actually get a view of the falls themselves. Despite climbing high up on the cliff edge on either side (and wading thigh deep through the icy water at the end of the lake), the sightline was always blocked by some rock outcrop.

Nevertheless, I was privileged to have this spectacular location all to myself, the evening light was improving, and we were going home the next day. Although frustrated in my original aim to photograph the waterfall, the thing to do was to come up with a Plan B. What else could I find? Landscape photography mostly seems to be like that. In a few instances I have been able to go to a location and successfully execute a 'pre-visualized' plan, but most often, and particularly when visiting somewhere for the first time, its just a matter of of actively looking around for serendipitous inspiration. My first try was to find a viewpoint where I could focus a small subsiduary fall. But that really was a trickle, not a waterfall, and despite my best efforts framing and zooming in it would never make a prominent main subject. On to Plan C; something that should have been more immediately obvious if I had not been so fixated on the waterfall itself. Every few minutes a larger than usual wave would break, with spray rising half way up the dark cliffs. Much more interesting!

I had carried a light pack with minimal gear - tripod, body and a single zom lens - but anticipating that I would want slow shutter speeds to blur the waterfall I did remember to pack a strong ND filter. That worked to give exposeures of a half or one second that, from viewing on the camera screen, looked to give a nice result on the waves breaking against the cliff. You never know quite how a wave is going to break, so I took many shots, timing the shutter release in advance of when I anticipated the spray would reach its peak, or at other times to catch the rivulets of water streaming down the cliff face following a wave. The photo here is a blend of two such shots. So, a 'made' image: not simply a snapshot of what I saw, but a fusion over two different timescales, blurring the water motion during each exposure and then superimposing a wave with its aftermath.

Stremoy, Faroe Islands: July 23, 2016

Ull er Føroya gull - Wool is the gold of the Faroe Islands

"Before fishing became the main industry of the Faroes at the beginning of the twentieth century, sheep farming, and trade in home-knitted goods were the main sources of income for most families. The Faroese sheep has been selectively bred over the centuries as much for the quality of its wool as for its meat. It is a particularly hardy animal, able to survive on the bare slopes of the islands all year round. Its wool, when spun, is exceptionally warm and water-resistant - necessary qualities for a climate where it rains on the majority of days in the year. One notable feature of the Faroese sheep is the variety of natural colours that can be spun from the fleeces. Although the majority of the sheep are white or cream, there are also sheep with black, brown and grey wool, as well as two-coloured sheep: white and black, and white and brown.

Even today there are no large sheep farms on the Faroes. The normal pattern is for families to tend a small flock on the mountain pastures around and above the villages. These sheep farmers - who might also be teachers, doctors or fishermen - join together for the seasonal rituals of caring for new-born lambs in the spring, rounding up the sheep for shearing in early summer, haymaking in late summer, and, in autumn, selecting the best rams for breeding and slaughtering some sheep for the family dinner table.

Most Faroese sheep are still sheared by hand clippers in the traditional way. The fleeces are then sold to the three main yarn manufacturers, who grade them according to colour. The wool is then carded and spun - and dyed for the coloured yarns - to produce yarn ready for knitting ". [The Island Wool Company]

Family gatherings to tend their sheep are commemorated in a Faroese stamp, and remain a part of Faroese life to this day. Our visit to the Faroes in July coincided with the time when the sheep were beginning to shed, when the fleece can be easily parted from the body with clippers or merely by sliding a hand between the old and new fleece layers. Driving along the main road crossing Stremoy we passed by a cluster of cars pulled up on the verge by a farmhouse, with many people and even more sheep gathered in a adjacent field. We walked up the farm road to investigate and were greeted by a farmer who, while clipping identifying marks into sheep's ears, gave us an account (in perfect English) of what was going on. From a photographer's perspective this was a tough scene. Too chaotic, too much happening at once, and highly dynamic as the sheep objected strenuously to their manhandling. Sam Abel can famously create complex, discretely layered images of such subjects, but my attempts to synthesize the numerous elements failed. What did work, however, was a shot zooming in on just one element. Several shearing stations were set up with wooden frames to hold the sheep's head, but all the sheepskins were thrown onto one growing pile. A young Faroese girl was playing amongst this, and I was happy to capture her expression entagled in the mass of wool.

The Falklands, November 2015; Sea Lion Island.

We never did see a sea lion during our days on this island, although an elephant seal came up the path to the door of the lodge. But, Sea Lion island is a great place for gentoos, rockhoppers and blue-eyed shags, as well as numerous song birds. Although the lodge is surrounded by colonies of gentoo penguins, the big rockhopper and shag colonies lie a few miles away ; not too far to walk, but we had the luxury of a land rover to drive us there. The trail - there are no roads on the island, just muddy tracks across the peat bogs - ends at the top of sheer cliffs, marked by a memorial to the HMS Sheffield, sunk offshore during the Falklands war. A granite amphitheater is home to the rockhopper penguins, which were dutifully hopping up and down among the boulders and small cliff face. Above them, nesting shags (imperial comorants) were outlined against the sky, squabbling with one another and with birds flying in carrying new nesting materials. All great fun to watch and photograph, and we spent several hours there.

Our leader, Hugh, had gone off to reconnoiter nearby areas, and returned to report a dense colony of shags on an open rock shelf a short distance along the top of cliffs. I was happy to have a change of scenery, and followed Hugh back, edging around the colony until we were on the upwind side. Shags were taking off into a strong wind that was blowing straight down along the line of the rock shelf. Fromm where I stood, they passed close overhead as they gained height. At any given instant there might be only two or three birds in the air, but the feeling was of a continuous stream; of being enveloped in a canopy of birds. To capture this impression in a photograph I set up my camera on a tripod, and fitted a super-wide 14mm lens for a field of view vide enough to encompass birds that passed almost directly above. With a cable release I then triggered the shutter, estimating by eye - rather than looking through the viewfinder - the instant when birds would be well placed. In total I took more than 50 shots, aiming to get a good mix with with birds distributed throughout the frame, and taking lots of extras assuming a high failure rate with birds clipped or outside the edges.

To composit the final photo I took a single image of the colony and blended it with about a dozen separate shots of the flying shags, using the 'darken' overlay mode in Photoshop and masking out all but the immediate area of sky around those birds I chose to include. With so many shots I could be quite selective, trying to achive a pleasing balance with the flight path of the birds appearing to originate from a single 'radiant' within the colony; rather like a meteor shower.

Looking back through previous posts, I find this is the sixth time that I have featured the tufa formations at Mono Lake as Photo-of-the-Month. Given that other photos encompass all seven continents from the Arctic to Antarctic circle, that must be a complement to this tny piece of California no more than a few hundred yards across. Indeed, Mono Lake is one of my favorite locations on earth to photograph - with the bonus that it is within a weekend driving distance from my home. The tufa and ancient saline lake are the foundation for creating striking images, but importantly the conditions are always different on each repeated visit. Situated in a high (6000 ft elevation) bowl beneath the Sierra Nevada mountains Mono Lake gets plenty of weather, and on several ocasions I have arrived during an afternoon thunderstorm that providentially cleared just in time for sunset. Moreover, the lake level is in continual flux, as determined by a balance between evaporation (there is no outflow), runoff from Sierra snowmelt, and the extent to which that inflow is diverted by the LA Department of Water and Power. The latter agency is legally required to adjust diversions to target an ecologically sound level some 14 ft above the present height. For a few years after the legal settlement that codified this decision the lake level rose by 10 ft, but more recently the prolonged drought in California has renderd this for nought. At the time of my visit, the lake was down to its lowest level in 20 years. That is not good for the vast numbers of birds nesting on islands that would become vulnerable to predators crossing a land bridge exposed by only a slight further drop in water level. It does, however, mean that the shoreline is continually changing; lagoons appear and disappear, grasses grow where previously there was shallow water or mud, tufa islands become connected to the land along sandy isthsmus. Most attractively, the low level has exposed an area of flat rocks at the tip of the South Tufa area, lapped by shallow translucent water that takes on yellow-turquoise tints. On a previous visit under grey, overcast skies I had been intrigued by photographing these colors as a pastel contrast to a monochrome background. Most recently I was lucky to have the chance to expand this color palette under dramatic sunset clouds.

This month's photo was taken using a 17 mm tilt-shift lens, utilizing a small tilt setting to increase depth of field, but primarily using shift to gain a wider field of view. Also, by combining two vertically shifted shots with the camera in landscape orientation I could obtain a final image in a square format, which makes a nice change from the exaggerated 3:2 aspect ratio of the standard 35 mm frame. Shifted images are usually made with a tripod-mounted camera, combining two shots taken in quick succession to, yield a result essentially the same as would be achieved by a single exposure if the camera sensor were larger. In light of the recent kerfuffle concerning Steve McCurry's 'Photoshopping' of some of his images I should explain that the two shots that were combined to create this image were taken at slightly different times and positions. The lower half is one of a shifted pair of shots I took after collapsing the tripod legs to get a low-down viewpoint emphasizing the foreground rocks and the translucent turquoise glow of the saline water. However, at that time the sunset light had not fully developed, and the matching upper image of the pair had only a nondescript sky. I ought to have left the camera set up where it was and waited for the light to change, but not knowing how the sunset might develop I repositioned the tripod a few feet to focus on reflections from the clouds. Within a few minutes the sky illuminated with nice color and beams from the setting sun as it descended through a clearing above the mountains. The shifted pair of shots I took at that time included a more dramatic sillhouette of the tufa spires against the clouds, but taken from a higher vantage point the lower shot did not capture the color of the water as effectively. In processing my images from that evening I first combined each pair of shifted captures as they were taken, but neither result was entirely satisfactory. An obvious solution was to mix and match, merging the better top-shifted frame for the sky with the bottom-shifted frame for the water and rocks. The image above is thus not a strict representaion of the scene at an instant of time, and would not meet the strict criteria of photojournalism or even entry for many photo contests, but I think it does succeed in conveying the otherworldy aspect and strange color palette of this unique place.

Back to penguins this month.

The photograph was taken at the 'Neck' of Saunders Island, a thin strip of sand connecting an outlying hill to the main island. This location is among the best wildlife sites in the Falkland Islands, hosting vast colonies of black-browed albatross and rockhopper penguins on the cliffs of the main island, together with a smaller colony of king penguins on the Neck itself. Our little group aboard the Hans Hansson had spent a very long, utterly wonderful day on the island and I was walking back to the beach for a Zodiac ride back to the boat, when I came across this little group of kings. They were quite isolated on a barren stretch of sand, and I was struck by the contrast with the densely teeming birds in the large colonies. Moreover, a typical Falklands mist had started to descend, patchily hiding the hillside and darkening the sky. Altogether there was a strangely moody, almost eerie feel to the scene - at least, that is what I felt, the penguins probably took no notice.

A recurring theme among photographers is that a photograph should convey the emotion of the person pressing the shutter button, beyond merely capturing the literal scene before the lens. That is usually difficult. A two dimensional, visual representation of an instant of time cannot directly convey aspects of the immediate environment such as sounds, smell, and temperature; yet alone the previous history of the photographer that has led him to this spot. In this case, though, it was strictly the visual aspects that dominated, and a simple 'snapshot' was sufficient to capture the mood. The little group of penguins were just hanging out on their way back to their colony from the ocean, and I had plenty of time to frame various compositions. Obligingly, one penguin threw back his head to call, and that provided the something extra to make this shot the winner. My only 'trickery' in capturing the photo was to use a graduated ND filter to darken the sky and enhance the moody atmosphere; and a little Photoshop tidying up to remove distracting debris on the beach.

The Neck of Saunders Island

King penguin colony in mist,

Penguins walking back to their colony

Enough of penguins - for this month at least...

Instead, I feature a much smaller subject - a few individuals among the thousands of monarch butterflies that gather to overwinter in the Pismo Beach Butterfly Grove. This was my first visit, and we arrived early on a January morning. My initial impression was that I was not impressed, and that the butterflies were going to be hard to photograph. Monarchs can't fly unless the air is warmer than about 55 F, so on this cool morning they were all clustered high in the trees, looking almost indistinguishable from dead leaves. Even though a 400 mm lens on my 7DII gave enough reach to resolve the fine wing patterns on individual butterflies, I could only frame large clumps of monarchs and it was hard to find compositions where they stood out from the random tangle of leaves and branches, interleaved with distracting highlights from the sky.

As the day warmed up, however, increasing numbers of butterflies took to the air, and some began to alight on a low tree close to the fence that keeps visitors well away from the butterflies. With the 400 mm lens I could now fill a good part of the frame with an individua lmonarch. Better yet, one of the branches was catching a shaft of sunlight, so butterflies on it were brightly highlighted against a deep shadowed background. I initially concentrated on static butterflies that had already landed, but then realized that those in flight might provide a better subject. Experimenting with different shutter speeds I used the lcd screen on the camera to see what would most pleasingly blur their motion. The optimal exposure looked to be 1/30s at f8: that nicely blurred the wing beat while mostly freezing the forward motion, so while the monarchs were rendered in an abstract fashion they remained sharp enough to be recognizable. I was particularly taken by the way the white dotted patterns on the wing margins often traced out beautiful swirls. Thus, capturing butterfly blurs is rather analogous to photographing waterfalls - a matter of taste as to what shutter speed results in the aestheticallymost attractive blur..

Watching butterflies approaching and leaving this one branch kept me happily engaged for an hour or more, and I got too engrossed to walk over to listen to the docent talk about the peculiar life cycle and migration of the monarchs. Altogether I accumulated more than 200 shots; a good archive from which to later make selections. For a final image I wanted to include several butterflies to convey the variety of patterns formed by their wing motions . No single shots captured more than two butterflies, so I composed the montage above by combining four individual frames with the monarchs disposed in a seemingly random, but hopefully pleasing pattern. The process was facilitated because the backgrounds were so dark I could turn them to complete black without losing any detail in the butterflies, allowing me to position them with complete freedom.

Continuing the penguin theme for this month: and addressing the issue of subject isolation.

For much of my time photographing penguins on our Southern Oceans voyages I was aiming to capture images that placed them in the context of their natural environment. For that reason, I was usually wandering around with a 24-105 mm zoom lens on a single camera, whereas my companions were armed with long telephotos. But I also wanted to get some shots that abstracted the penguins from their background; isolating them to capture the essence of 'penguiness'.

Almost every sort of photograph must deal with subject isolation - 'cutting the cluter'. The main subject should be immediately obvious, and should be clearly delineated from the background. Of course, the background often complements and provides context for the subject, but nevertheless the viewer's eye should go first to the main subject before exploring elsewhere. In wildlife photography a common ploy is to use a long, wide-aperture telephoto lens so that only the animal or bird that forms the subject is in sharp focus, and any background or foreground distractions become pleasingly, and non-distractingly blurred. That technique works well, but can become rather cliched and, nevertheless, careful attention is needed to find neutral backgrounds.

Here, I wanted to get rid of the background entirely, leaving only the penguin. Photographing against a background of clean, featureless snow would be one option, but that can create an artificial 'cardboard-cutout' effect. For this month's photo a fortuitous combination of location and abysmal weather provided an alternative approach. Our small group of photographers spent the last day of our week on the Falkland Islands visiting Volunteer Point, home to a small colony of king penguins approached by a rough drive of several miles through peat bogs on the East Island. Gettting out of the Land Rovers we found a freezing, gale-force wind blowing, and I soon became disheartended trying to get good shots of the kings in a rather muddy colony while struggling to hold my camera still against the wind and bouts of shivering. Going for a walk seemed like a good idea, both to get warm and to scout out other possibilities. I headed down to the nearby beach and there discovered that the wind was blowing a thick carpet of sand to a height of several inches, through which a few penguins (kings and magellanics) were nonchalantly marching to and from the ocean. The blowing sand obscured all background details, giving the effect I was looking for, but to maximize this and get a 'penguins-eye' perspective I had to lie down flat, with my camera raised just to the level of the top of the airborne sand. That position was tenable only looking downwind, so I chose a spot and waited for suitable penguins to walk by. My favorite was the little magellanic penguin featured above, bravely carrying back nesting material for his mate.

This photo reinforces the axiom that good shots frequently involve some discomfort and suffering, even though that might not be apparent in the final result. Half an hour lying on a damp beack in a sandstorm was kind to neither camera nor corneas; the zoom ring on my brand new 100-400 lens and my eyes were both gritty for days afterwards, and I took a long to time to warm up and stop shivering. In retrospect it was a good thing I did not know at the time that the small refuge hut at Volunteer Point was equipped with a propane heater, or I may have never ventured down the beach.

Everybody loves penguins! The different species (seventeen in total; among which I have been fortunate to see nine) all have their very different and adorable quirks and behaviors. Apart from the obvious issue of travelling to where they live, penguins are very easy subjects to photograph. A Google search for 'penguin photographs' pulls up nearly one million hits. There are a lot of penguin photos out there! On our recent voyages to penguin lands in the Southern Ocean one of my aims was to portray these strange birds in a different way; not simply to replicate numerous existing photos but to capture the essence of penguins and place them within their environment.

But how to achieve this? I had little in the way of preconceived ideas beyond trying motion blur effects (to be the subject of a future Photo-of-the-Month). Instead, ideas came as fortuitous opportunities presented themselves; as in the two photos featured this month. After several days of wild weather on South Georgia, we found the conditions during our landing at Gold Harbour living up to its name. We shared the beach with an enormous colony of king penguins and spent a full day photographing them. Kings are my favorite species because of the beautiful yellow-shading-to-orange coloration around the head and neck of adults, and their inquisitive nature. Stay quietly on a beach on South Georgia and they will come up to you and gently peck on tripod legs and overtrousers.

Toward evening the sun began to cast a beautiful diffuse golden glow. Sitting amongst a small huddle of kings peacefully grooming themselves, a thought came that I might be able to sillhouette them against the sun. Indeed by lying flat and placing my camera on the ground I could get the necessary angle of view without being so close that I disturbed the birds. Time was short as the sun would soon set behind the mountains and clouds intermittently blocked the sun, so I rapidly took numerous shots, bracketing exposures and trying various angles with the sun either completely occluded behind penguins or just peeking to the side to create sunstars. Most shots were failures, as I expected, but a few worked both from the point of view of composition and technically (horizon level, sharp, not over or underexposed). After selecting the best, the remaining problem was to deal with the enorrmous dynamic range in the RAW files. Before processing the penguins appeared as mere sillhouettes against a bright and washed out sky. To create the final images and bring up the shadow details I needed every trick in the Photoshop book, primarily using layer masks to apply drastic curves adjustments.,

Anne and I recently returned from a small boat voyage to the sub-antarctic island of South Georgia aboard the MV Hans Hansson. South Georgia is accessible only by sea - there is no airport or even airstrip on the island and no accommodations or inhabitants beyond a small research station and a seasonal museum. Our tour operator, Cheesemans Ecology Safaris, had originally proposed that we would be able to camp overnight, but in the end the requisite permit was not forthcoming owing to lack of sufficient scientific justification. I was disappointed to lose this opportunity to do long-exposure night photography on the island, as this is impossible from a boat: even in calm water the boat is constantly swinging at anchor. But there was one chance: the Hans Hansson is small enough to moor at the dock at the old whaling station at Grytviken whereas larger ships must anchor offshore, and we would spend one night with the possibility to go onshore.

I already had a subject in mind, inspired by a beautiful night time photo of the Petrel, a wrecked whaling ship close to our mooring, which has also featured on a British postage stamp. (See photos below). "The Petrel is the best-preserved whale-catcher at South Georgia. She was built in 1929 at Nylands Verksted in Oslo. She is 244.8 gross tons and 31.1 m (115 feet) long. Petrel was withdrawn from the whaling fleet at Grytviken in 1956 and converted to a sealing vessel the following year. This involved removing her whale-winch and replacing it with an ordinary cargo winch, creating a large cargo hatch (for loading the seal blubber), removing the gun platform and the cat-walk that connected it with the bridge on the starboard side. Petrel was one of the first catchers to be equipped with a cat-walk, which was introduced in 1926. The line-blocks were removed from the mast and a derrick installed. She was capable of 11 knots from her 810 indicated horse-power triple-expansion engine. Her funnel has been re-painted in the Salvesen (Leith Harbour) colours, but when she was operated by Grytviken she had blue and white bands on her funnel." [South Georgia Whaling Museum]. The Petrel was restored and the whale gun replaced by the British garrison stationed in South Georgia after the Falklands war. A 1991 photo (below) shows her afloat with spick paintwork, but she is now grounded and undergoing rapid, if picturesque decay.

I woke to my alarm at about 1:00 am local time (the World's least inhabited time zone!), and quietly went out on deck with tripod, camera, interval timer and 14 mm super-wide lens. An immediate problem was that the gangplank had been removed and the tide had gone out since we boarded in the evening, so that the jetty was now three feet above the boat, leaving a wide gap to black freezing water below. Trying to jump across from the rail did not seem wise, so after passing over the camera gear I stretched across and pulled up on a good finger hold in the planking of the jetty. Although the Petrel was then only a hundrd yards away, getting there continued to be a little hazardous, with snow covering ground strewn with industrial detritus and light only from red and green harbor navigation lights and a small led headlamp.

Any hope of replicating my inspirational shot with Milky Way or startrail photography had seemed unlikely given the typical weather of South Georgia, and indeed a keen wind was sending clouds scudding across the sky with a light snowfall. Moreover, the wind constrained photos to only one direction, as otherwise the lens became covered by blowing snow during minute-long exposures. Fortuitously, however, that direction placed the red navigation light directly behind the Petrel and, though occluded by the ship, its light imparted a red glow to the falling snow. A two minute shutter opening at ISO 1600 gave a good exposure for the sky and diffusely blurred out individual snowflakes. Some light was falling directly on the Petrel from the green navigation light, but this was distant and dim as compared to the red in the sky. I thus supplemented the exposure by light-painting with my headlamp. After a few experiments I decided that the image on the camera screen looked good enough, so I could end this masochistic persuit and snuggle back into my warm bunk to thaw out fingers and toes.

The recently issued third edition of Laurent Matres' book on Photographing the Southwest: UtahPine Valley includes several new locations, including Pine Valley, a rather remote site, deep in the Dixie National Forest near the Utah/Nevada stateline. After the crowds of people at Monument Valley, I was looking for peace and solitude to break my journey back home, and from Laurant's description and photos Pine Park looked as if it should be both secluded and photogenic. The main feature is an area of white, eroded Tuff, a 1000ft layer of consolidatede ash erupted millions of years ago from a nearby caldera. Weathering of this soft rock has produced intriguing formations, reminiscent of a miniature version of Tent Rocks in New Mexico, or Cappadocia in Turkey.

The most scenic area lies in a westward-facing bowl, and I tried to get there before sunset to catch the warm light on the rocks. The roads through the forest are suprisingly good, with the last section being well-graded dirt despite leading nowhere other than a tiny campsite with no facilities beyond a single table and a post proclaiming 'designated campsite'. Nevertheless, I had underestimated the total driving distance, some 70 miles after leaving the interstate at Cedar City , and arrived exactly as the light faded. I did get a single, hasty shot, but not what I had hoped for. Anyhow, it was a nice place to be. I had not seen anyone for the last 15 miles, and the designated campsite was a flat area with soft pine needles on which to spread out my camping mat. I soon had a campfire going, and settled down with the last can of Tecate from the cooler to to eat a 'dogs-eye' pie from the Aussie pie shop in Costa Mesa. With a full tummy I had a comfortable night, waking in advance of the Marimba chimes from my iPod as the first light of dawn started to challenge the still bright moonlight.

Its always easy for me to find good reasons to stay snuggled up in a warm sleeping bag; the dawn sky looked boringly clear, and the sun would be rising behind the tent rocks, so they would not receive direct light for hours. But, having driven all that way I wanted to get a good photo, and past experience had taught me that I am no good at predicting conditions and that it is best to go and see what may transpire. Its a quick half mile drive back up the road from the campsite to the rocks, and the best overlook is from the side of the road itself, so there is no hiking. A good job, as serrated layers of thin cloud that had been almost invisible began to glow with the rising sun just as I arrived. The light show lasted maybe for 10 minutes, and I took many shots as it progressed. My final choice was at a time when the serrated clouds were well illuminated, and clouds directly above where the sun would rise (out of the frame to the right) cast a diffuse backlight over the formations. Because the sky was much brighter than the foreground I thought about using a graduated ND filter to even the exposure, but worried that it would introduce an artificial black band across the higher formations. Instead, I took bracketed exposures so I could achieve a more subtle blend later in Photoshop. A final consideration in processing was how to crop the image, which I had framed quite wide to allow some leeway. Should the sky be given prominence and fill more of the frame, or were the rocks the main point of the image? Giving both equal space and weight would create a conflict, and put the horizon awkwardly in the middle of the frame. My feeling was that the formations were the main point of this photo, and that the sky needed to be cropped, despite loosing some nice red clouds above the striations.

The evening of September 27th marked the last of a tetrad of lunar eclipses. The totality period (around an hour) of this eclipse was unusually long; for viewers in the Western US the eclipse started around the time of moonrise; and, the next lunar eclipse will not be until 2018. So, that gave me plenty of reasons to justify a trip to photograph the eclipse at an interesting location. In thinking about possibilities my criteria were somewhere with a high likelyhood of clear skies, and some spectacular foreground scenery in a view looking almost due East. The Trona Pinnacles came to mind, but the classic view of the Mittens in Monument Valley won out. Even though involving a much longer drive, that iconic view is hard to beat, and gave an excuse to take a few extra days to photograph in Utah.

The Photographers Ephemeris indicated that the moon would rise next to the East Mitten as viewed from the visitor center, and then follow an almost perfect 45 degree diagonal path, with maximum eclipse at an altitude of about 22 degrees, and ending at about 40 degrees. I wanted to frame the scene to encompass both mittens and the entire eclipse sequence, and the angle of view of my 17 mm TS lens on a crop-frame camera looked about ideal for that. To compress the horizontal extent a little, and have the moon rising closer to the mitten I chose to shoot from near the camping area, which also had the advantage of taking me away from all the other photographers clustered by the main parking lot. Then it was just a matter of setting up a tripod (heavily weighted with rocks in a shopping bag to minimize the chance I would dislodge it), focusing the camera to infinity, framing the scene, and settling back in my camp chair to wait for moonrise. In the past I have struggled trying to correctly set external timers, sometimes coming back in the morning to a camera that should have been taking shots at intervals through the night only to find just the single image when I set it going. My new 7DII, however, has a built in timer, easily and clearly set through the menu rather than squinting at the tiny screen on an external device. I decided on an iterval of 12 minutes, to give a good separation between each exposure of the moon as it rose, while capturing several shots during the period of total eclipse. But I could not leave the camera entirely unattended - there is the need to change exposure settings because the brightness of the moon changes enormously (about 2000 times) as it goes from fully illuminated to completely eclipsed. I used the shutter speed/ISO settings suggested by Michael Frye and found them to work well.

Producing a final photograph from an image sequence like this is a matter of blending together the individual images, but that's not an entirely mechanical process. For the base image, I took a shot just before sunset, with the Mittens still illuminated by the sun, and darkened it to look more in keeping with the nightime sequence of the eclipse. The problem, then, was what to do about the sky. If the eclipse had been later at night the sky would have been completely dark, giving a black background on which to place each exposre for the moon using the 'lighten' function in Photoshop. But now the partial phase of the eclipse had already started at moonrise, when the sky was still bright. Making the entire sky dark would look very artificial; but equally it would look strange if the later stages of the eclipse, with the moon high in the sky, were on a bright sky background. My solution was to take two image of the sky - one captured at moonrise, and the other during totality when the stars were brightly visible without being obscured by moonlight - and blend these using a vertical transparency gradient.

The most obvious attraction of a good sunset is the sky itself. But this is a case where the camera has a very hard time capturing what the eye sees. The range of intensity values between those brigh, red-glowing clouds and shadowed foreground is usually just too great, leaving foreground features as mere sillhouettes. To encompass the full dynamic range of the scene usually needs multiple exposures or use of a a graduated ND filter. Even then, it takes some trickery (and subtlety) to cram this into the much smaller range of any display medium (print or computer screen) without producing a false and obviously manipulated result.

One solution to this dilemma is simply to turn around and face away from the glowing clouds. They will be lit up by the rich, warm color of the setting sun, but unlike the very directional light of the sun itself, the clouds act as a vast diffuser, providing a wonderfully even, soft illumination. This month's photo thus pairs with its immediate predecessor; both images were captured within about 5 minutes of each other, but looking in opposite directions, and with the emphasis now on the ground rather than the sky.

As recounted last month, I was fortunate to be at Mono Lake when a clearing storm created a spectacular sunset. At first I was engrossed in shooting the sky, but then noticed that the tufa formations, which are inherentlya muted grey, were taking on some beautiful color. To get a more interesting composition I headed along the beach toward the eastern end of the South Tufa, where there is a concentrated 'cityscape' of slender vertical towers. Space here is constrained, so to capture a more extensive panorama I took a series of vertical shots that I could later stitch together; remembering to use manual exposure and, without tripod, trying to keep the horizon level and centered for each shot. The light was fading quickly, and I could get only one sequence, taken from a quickly chosen vantage point that gave some elevation looking down onto the formations. In retrospect, I wish I had been able to include some more interesting foreground, or leading line into he picture. Being critical, it is rather horizontally linear. That's where scouting and pre-visualization of a location come into play; to know in advance exactly where you want to be in the event that you are lucky to be there during such evanescent light. Here, I knew the general area where I wanted to be, but had never mapped out very specific viewpoints that would suit different lighting conditions.

Mono Lake holds great attraction for me, and for numerous other photographers. The tufa towers emerging from the water and shore give a strange and otherworldly presence. As far as I know there is no other place like it in the world. Although there may be otherplaces where freshwater springs bubbling up from the bottom of saline lakes have created similar tufa formations, they would lie underwater and invisible. At Mono Lake the thirsty citizens of Los Angeles have exposed the tufa, diverting the streams that feed the lake over many years so that the water level has dropped precipitously. A legal agreement with the L.A. Department of Water and Power was meant to rectify the situation and restore the lake back to its historic level in 1950, but ongoing drought has now left the lake at not much above its lowest ever height. For the visitor that has exposed more of the formations, but left a wide expanse of muddy foreshore, seething with dense clouds of alkali flies.

On a sunny day, Mono Lake is a hard place to make a good photograph. The tufa is a nondescript grey, choppy waves preclude reflections, and the beaches look scruffy with scattered clumps of tufa among the mud. But with some good lighting, the place becomes transformed. That was my motivation to visit a few weeks ago when, after photographing the Badwater Ultramarathon in Death Valley, the weather forecast predicted thunderstorms over the Owens Valley. The morning had started clear, but fluffy white clouds started to develop during the day and by mid afternoon formed towering thunderheads. I went down to the South Tufa area to try out my new lightning trigger, and captured several shots of lightning strikes. I had been carefully noting the intervals between lightning and thunder, and when the lightning seemed to be getting too close I beat a hasty retreat back to my SUV. That was a good decision, both for safety and because the sky blackened and the rain became torrential. Soon after the thunderstorm died out, but the rain continued, with little visibility through the murk. All the other vehicles left the parking lot, but I stayed, re-reading the 'Worst Journey in the World' on my Kindle, and trying to convince myself that there was a faint brightning in the sky to the West and that maybe, just maybe, there was a possibility of a sunset if the sun could break through a gap between the clouds and the mountains...

In addition to technical skills and artistic sensibilities, patience is an important attribute for a landscape photographer. Spectacular light is fleeting and comes rarely - you need to wait and be ready for it. There have been times in the past when a pervading grey gloom has convinced me that there was no hope, only to to experience a beautiful sunset after hiking back to my car. This time I was going to stick it out. And, as a practical matter, it made no difference whether I stayed at the South Tufa, ready to run down the boardwalk at the first hint of light. If I had a reservation in a motel in Lee Vining the temptation of lobster taquitos at the Whoa Nellie Delli and a comfortable bed might have lured me away. But I was car camping, with a good dinner and a can of beer in the cooler, and my fluffy goose-down sleeping bag laid out in the back. Hotels, beds, restaurants and suchlike are best shunned by the dedicated photographer. Galen Rowell got the best photograph of his life when he left his companions to their dinner and set off running across the Tibetan plateau chasing a rainbow; and I was surprised when my companions on an Antarctic photo cruise stayed at their dinner tables while a luminescent blue iceberg floated past the windows.

The 'Worst Journey' is an engrossing read, so I was happily entertained while the rain continued to rattle the roof. Occasional glances through the rain-smeared windscreen showed only marginal improvement in the weather, and I had little inclination to get out for a better look having neglected to pack any raingear despite the forecast - an oversight conditioned perhaps by the almost total lack of rain in California for the last several years. But then, just as I got to the part where the Terra Nova was close to floundering in a great storm in the Southern ocean, the sky over the Sierras really did look to be brighter, and a faint glimmer of yellow appeared over the lake. I had put my camera ready in a small pack and, checking that it had a fresh battery and card with lots of space, grabbed this along with my tripod and headed out quickly down the trail, with some rain still falling.

By the time I got to the beach the light was becoming spectacular, with a diffuse, luminous yellow glow from a cloudbank over the lake, and clouds to the West starting to take on a red tinge. At that point I was faced with a decision of whether to take time to set up the tripod and aim for a few carefully composed shots, or to go handheld, cover more ground and have more spontaneous possibilities, but at the cost of noisier, less sharp images as the light faded. My watch showed that it was already only a few minutes before sunset so the light was going to be very transitory. Without much conscious thought I opted for the latter option, dropped the tripod and set off running for the closest tufa formations. I had brought only a single lens - a 24 to 105 zoom - and even at the wide setting it could not fully encompass the span of the sky, so I concentrated on taking a series of shots to later stitch into panoramas. Handheld, that needed some discipline to keep the horizon centered and level; a job complicated by the need to keep wiping raindrops from the lens. The yellow glow was my main subject, but just when I thought the light could not possibly get better a rainbow appeared!

In retrospect, I rate this as the second best sunset I have been privileged to experience (and photograph). The best was an amazing evening at the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia (subject of last month's photo), that combined wonderfully sculpted clouds with colors transitioning across the red end of the spectrum, all reflected by the flooded lakebed. At Mono Lake the water was too choppy for reflections, but in compensation I had never before seen such a luminescent yellow glow, yet alone with a rainbow accompaniment. It was an intense, almost spiritual feeling to be there, particularly because I was entirely alone at this popular tourist site. My only regret is that I was so occupied with technicalities such as checking histograms and choosing ISO settings in the fading light that I had little time to simply become immersed in the experience. I wish I had more memories of that evening stored in synapses rather than pixels!.

My selection of a photo this month was prompted by a recent article in the New York Times Sunday magazine by Jaime Lowe, entitled "I don't believe in God, but I believe in lithium", that details her 20-year struggle with bipolar disorder. She was treated - successfully - with lithium, a mood stabilizer that helps stop and prevent mood cycles and is usually the first medication tried with bipolar patients. However, as is the case for many (most!) other drugs used to treat phschological and neurological problems, little is understood of how lithium actually works in the brain. One hypothesis is that it acts to inhibit the recycling of inositol trisphosphate (IP3), an intracellular 'messenger' molecule that regulates many functions in neurons and other cells. My lab studies the actions and functions of IP3, and we recently published a paper describing that lithium can protect cells from damage caused by the amyloid proteins found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.

Well, that's all very interesting, but this is my photography website, not my lab website. What has it got to do with the photo?

The link comes from an account later in Jaime's article describing her visit to the Salar de Uyuni; a vast salt flat in the Bolivian Altiplano which is the world's largest reserve of lithium. Her article is illustrated with several photos of the Salar but, despite the regard in which Mike Johnson (The Online Photographer) hold the NY Times as the "World's Best Photography Magazine", I thought the accompanying images were rather mundane. That gave me an excuse to go back into my archives to look through photos I had taken of the Salar during a visit in spring of 2011. Among these, I thought the one feature here best captured Jaime's description of the Salar as "a perfect backdrop for a grandiose delusion".

About the photograph itself, it is largely a consequence of being at an exeptional location under exceptional circumstances, including spectacular sunset clouds and flooding of the salt flat to create a giant mirror of the sky. Often it takes a lot of work to extract a good image from a scene; to picture something which is not immediately obvious to the eye. In this instance, though, I can claim little credit as photographer. It was just a matter of pointing the camera in an interesting direction, getting the horizon level, and adjusting the exposure with a slow shutter speed to smooth small ripples on the water.

June 30th marked our 30th wedding anniversary, and for this month's photo I thought I would choose one that holds special memories for Anne and me. Our travels around the world have taken us to many beautiful places, but remote islands rank among the best; Easter Island, Iceland, Falkland Islands, South Georgia and (if Kiwis will forgive the description as 'remote') New Zealand. After several visits, Iceland has come to feel familiar, and visits seem almost like returning home. South Georgia, on the other hand is certainly nothing like home. It is cold, windy, rugged and utterly inhospitable; but the stark scenery and, above all, the myriad hundreds of thousands of penguins make the island one of the most spectacular places on the planet - Art Wolfe's "favorite place on earth".

I took this Month's photo during our best day on the island, following an early morning landing at St. Andrews Bay. We embarked in Zodiacs soon after dawn, anticipating a full day with the penguins, and provisioned with bio-secure cheese sandwiches tucked in our pockets. The landing site was near cliffs at the far southern end of the sweeping 2 mile-long bay. From there I set off along the beach toward the largest King penguin colony, keeping a careful lookout for agressive fur seals hiding behind grass tussocks. Saint Andrew's Bay is one of those places that is so overwhelming that I tend to freeze, trying to decide which of the many possibilities to photograph: wide angle to capture the enormity of the penguin colony beneath the mountains; telephoto shots to isolate individual behaviors; or just sit down on the beach and let the penguins come to me (they are very curious about tripods). In terms of composition, trying to capture penguin colonies present a similar problem to photographing in forests - there is just too much random detail and stuff going on, making it tough to get a simplified, coherent picture. However, the topography of St. Andrews bay presents at least one natural solution. Two glacier-fed rivers join a short way above the surf line, forming a 'V' of land on which the penguins conveniently array themselves. The converging waters provide a geometric structure, framing the countless numbers of penguins receding into the distance. Getting the shot did involve wading out into the freezing and swift waters of the confluence - but that's what Arctic Muck Boots are for!

Anne and I visited South Georgia in November, 2013 on an 'Ultimate Antarctica" tour run by Jo van Os. We had planned it as a one-off , 'trip-of-a-lifetime" voyage. But, the lure of South Georgia was too strong, and we will be returning again during the entire month of November on a small-boat expedition orgainzed by Cheeseman's Ecology Safaris.

There are many reasons for a photographer to return to favorite locations multiple times. On any given visit I find I can get locked into a particular 'vision' of what I am looking for, fixate on using a particular lens, and generally just fail to register most of the myriad possibilities . A return trip, after the preconceptions have faded often leads to new insights. And, the light and weather conditions are never quite the same. David Muench's quote that 'bad weather leads to good photographs' must be one of the truest axioms in landscape photography. But, living in Southern California, bad weather is rather rare!

In one sense, that certainly applies to one of the most evocative locations in California, the ancient bristlecone pine forest high in the White Mountains. I have visited many times, usually in summer and under startlingly clear, deep blue skies. Of course, the White Mountains do experience atrocious bad weather during winter, but then the high elevations are snow-bound, and the formidable gates controlling access by both paved and dirt roads are locked shut. Hiking in would be a possibility, but very committing, requiring a multi-day backpack carrying serious winter camping gear in addition to camera gear over many miles and with an elevation gain of over 7000 ft. The recent forecast of a rare May storm gave the prospect of an easier option. Following an exceptionally dry winter with minimal snowpack the roads to the bristlecone pine forest had opened very early in the year, and it seemed that a brief storm might deposit enough snow to be photographically interesting, without blocking access. That indeed proved to be the case. I was able to drive most of the way along the unpaved road following the crest of the mountains, encountering only mud and a few patches of shallow snow. Finally, a mile of so before where the road contours the mountainside at an elevation of about 11,000ft toward Patriarch Grove the snow grew deep, and a couple of red traffic cones suggested that would be a good place to park. From there I hiked in, grateful that I had thought to bring my down jacket, but regretting having no better footwear than running shoes.

Patriarch Grove is always a peaceful, serene place; but even more so this day. I much prefer it over the more popular Schulman grove, both because of the scarcity of people, and because the trees at this higher elevation are themselves more scarce and widely spread out. For most of my time I was alone, and the onset of a gentle, but dense snowfall reduced visibility so that I was isolated in a white landscape punctuated only by the ancient trees. Photography was thus not a matter of landscapes, but instead the soft, diffused light and veiling snowfall enhanced the subtle colors of the weatherd wood and facilitated intimate portraits of individual trees without distracting background clutter.

In summer, I find the dead, weathered snags of the bristlecones make the best subjects, contrasting the bare ochre trunks and limbs against the deep blue sky. In snowfall, however, that did not work so well. Against a white background the bare trees appeared as dark sillhouettes, and my subsequent attempts to bring up the shadows in post-processing gave an artificial look. Instead, I had better success by selecting the still-living trees (only a few thousand years old!) and finding viewpoints where bark-free ancient wood was exposed before live branches bearing pine needles. That gave a nice 'self-framing' effect, with the colorful wood accentuated against a dark background, rather than the uniform white of the sky. The snow and cloud-filled sky further helped isolate a single subject, allowing an intimate portrait of individual trees, with background clutter minimized by the veiling, mist-like effect of the gently falling snow while retaining enough detail to still provide a sense of place. Because of its symmetry and twisted branches reminiscent of uplifted, clasped arms, the tree shown above is my favorite among others I shot that afternoon.

Both the taking and the selection of this month's photo were influenced by two different equipment failures; but with a serendipitous outcome...

For a recent trip to Burma, I took a 24-105 f4 zoom as my main and 'walk-around' lens. After the first week it suffered irreperable damage - not from any fault of the lens, but owing to human (my!) error, about which I won't elaborate further. That left me with only a 50 mm f1.4 lens as a backup to fill the gap between my 14 mm superwide and 100-400 telephoto. Of necessity, the 50 mm thus became my main lens for the remainder of the trip. This was a lens I had purchased many years ago but had never used much, mostly out of laziness because a zoom makes it that much easier to frame a composition. But a fast prime certainly has advantages, and was well suited to our 'Faces of Burma' photo safari which concentrated on portraiture. 

Young novice monks were a popular subject to capture in their native environment of ancient, elaborately carved monasteries. The interiors of the monasteries provided light which, although wonderfully diffused, was often very dim; emphasizing the advantage of a fast prime lens. Moreover, the very shallow depth of field afforded by the wide aperture enabled enhanced separation between the main subject and background. Both these factors are illustrated in this photo. In framing the shot I placed the monk's body before the inky black interior to maximize contrast, and focus attention on his face. The light was in deep shade and even at f1.4 needed an exposure of 1/60s, so I would have been struggling to get a sharp shot with my zoom. And, this aperture just nicely gave a slight blur to the teak carvings, retaining enough detail to complement,  but not compete with the monk for the viewer's attention.

The original shot, taken on a Canon 5DIII, was, of course, in color; and I had first posted it on my website as a color image (here). When trying to make a print of this I encountered asecond equipment failure - my printer (an Epson R3880) started dribbling black ink. Curiously, this problem ocurred only with the photo-black ink for printing on glossy paper, not with the black ink for printing on matte paper. (Especially curious because both inks share the smae nozzles and feed tubes - the printer just switches between ink tanks depending on the type of paper selected. If anyone knows a cure, please contact me.)  As an immediate fix I switched to printing on matte paper. That results in a more muted palette, and it then struck me that color really did not add anything to the photo, and if fact that the ochre-red of the robe was a distraction. Thus prompted, I did a b/w conversion, adjusting the sliders to darken the reds. The final result, after a little judicious cropping, I much prefer in black and white: and it makes a great matte print!

A 'tree in a pothole' sounds a rather mundane title; but the tree here is a most evocative subject. I have been looking for such a tree for several years, having seen Guy Tal's images of trees isolated among a sandstone wilderness. Hovever, Guy does not reveal locations; my own random wanderings were unfruitful; and an exploration last year following up an internet suggestion to look behind Tunnel Slot were thwarted by deep water in the slot. I had also heard that the top of Dance Hall rock was a good place to look, but a previous attempt to check that out was also thwarted by water after the dying fringes of a hurricane turned the Hole in the Rock road into slippery goop.

My Utah trip this spring break was enlivened by the delivery, just a few days before I departed, of Laurent Matre's third edition of his guide to Southern Utah. The book describes many new locations not in the earlier editions, and among them was confirmation, and a photo, of a solitary cottonwood tree growing in a deep pothole on top of the sandstone plateau behind Dance Hall Rock. After driving down the now dry, but washboarded road, I reached Dance Hall by mid afternoon, hiked around the side and scrambled up onto the surprisingly vast expanse of undulating slickrock. There are potholes everywhere up there: mostly empty, one occupied by a tangled jungle of several trees, and just one 'perfect' pothole with a single tree.

As with many of the best photographic subjects, this forms a very simple composition  - simply a tree, a round pothole and the sweep of the rock around it. However, depending on season, weather and the intent of the photographer it would serve as a visual metaphor for many emotions and human traits: bare branches against a lowering sky as a symbol of isolation and foreboding; or, as I saw it with fresh green  leaves, as an icon of tenacity and perseverence under arduous conditions. The photos above illustrate different interpretations, all captured over just a few hours before and after sunset. I am sure I have nowhere near exhausted the possibilities, and hope to return during a summer thunderstorm, at the peak of fall color, and under snow-laden winter skies.

Still in Burma for this month's photo - but, as promised, no more monks. Instead another portrait that I like as a photograph, and which also serves as social commentary.

We spent three nights in the ancient Burmese captial of Mandalay, staying in a very nice, Western style hotel directly across a busy road fronting the Ayarwady (Irrawaddy) River. The road forms an abrupt and striking transition betweenFirst World to Third World. On one side, mud banks are densely settled by a shanty town extending a mile or more along the river (photo #1 below), on the other a newly installed kiosk with ATM gives immediate access to unimaginable wealth for those equipped with a plastic card and a PIN number. (I withdrew $100 in Khat; the majority of Burmese citizens subsist on an annual income of less than $200.) Given the proximity I was able to get down to the river in the early morning to photograph as the river people cooked their breakfast and began their work. Among the many occupations, the sand carriers were particularly striking: women and young girls carrying massive baskets of damp sand balanced on their heads. The sand is quarried from mid-river islands, loaded into rowboats and ferried across to the riverbank (photo #2). There it is transferred to baskets that are transferred from one carrier to another (photo #3) for the steep climb up to waitig carts on the roadway.
 
I took many shots of the sand carriers. This, I think, worked best. Not from any deliberate forethought in composition, but just a happy coincidence of nice lighting, context among the boats to give a sense of place, and an expression on the girl's face that conveys the effort and tedium of her occupation.

A companion photo this month to accompany my January photo: more young Burmese monks enjoying themselves.

This was another set-up photo shoot. Daniel recruited a half dozen monks (with their Abbot's permission) to energetically sweep the courtyard of their monastery. The idea was to get them sufficiently engaged that they would lose any stilted, posed expressions, and would kick up a good cloud of dust to enliven our photographs. Indeed, they thought it highly amusing to be performing in front of a group of western photographers and got to sweeping with abandon.

Capturing a good image in this sort of situation is a mix of deliberate preparation, luck, and shooting many frames to select the best one after the fact. In terms of preparation, I had little choice over composition or angle. A group of  several photographers needs to stay in a group to avoid having each other in the picture; and some members can certainly elicit vocal grumbles if they do get in the way. I decided my best bet would be to lie down in front of everyone else. That got me out of their shots, and provided a low angle that would accentuate the brooms and give more drama. Also, I anticipated that I would offer an attractive target for the monks to sweep dust and gravel towards; a decision that involved balancing the likelyhood of getting a more dynamic photo against possible injury to camera or self.  My other main decision was to select a slow enough shutter speed to blur motion of the brooms, while keeping the monks themselves reasonably sharp. That allowed me to stop the aperture right down to keep a wide depth of field, and I switched to servo focusing to automatically follow the monks as I shot off a burst on motor drive as they advanced toward us with brooms flying.

The photo above is my favorite from the sequence - largely, of course, because of the gleeful expression. And, there is a nice dust cloud, and motion blur in the brooms. A little cropping from the full frame removed distracting limbs and broom handles of other monks around the edges, and I cloned out the edge of a broom that intruded too far on the left.

Next month's photo will be something different. No more monks - for a while at least.

This month's photo was taken in a monastery as Salay, an isolated Burmese village near Bagan. It might seem incongrous that Buddhist monks would play football, but the account below, taken from the website of Dietmar Temps, provides a good explanation.

"Myanmar (Burma) is one of the most devout Buddhist countries in the world. About 89% of the people are Buddhist. People in Myanmar practice the Theravada Buddhism, which is more austere and ascetic, but also harder to practice than the Mahayana Buddhism, the other main branch of the Buddhism. Theravada Buddhism is also followed in Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Laos and Thailand. No one really knows, but experts estimates that in Myanmar live about half a million monks. It's customary for a male in Myanmar to enter a monastery twice in his life. Once as a samanera, a novice monk, between the age of 10 and 20, and again as a hpongyi, a fully ordained monk, sometime at the age of 20. Some might remain a monk for just a few days, while others stay for life. Monks hold the highest status in the society of Myanmar. The overwhelming majority of the monks and novices in Myanmar wear maroon- or ochre-colored robes. Monks receive two meals per day, breakfast and lunch and they are not allowed to eat after 12:00 noon. The novices in Myanmar have quite an easy-going life. They only have to keep 10 precepts, a fully ordained monk has 227 precepts. Young novices are allowed to play football, watch TV, play video games and have fun, which is great to see, because all in all they are just normal kids."

The scene above is indeed kids being kids, despite their monastic robes. The game was not entirely spontaneous, having been arranged by Daniel, our local Burmese guide, who rounded up some novices and produced a football. But the young monks got very much into the spirit of it, and their expressions and committment are entirely genuine. The Burmese people are passionate about football, which was introduced early during the period of British colonial rule by Sir George Scott. They closely follow both domestic and foreign football matches (Manchester United!), and the blackouts typical of the shaky electricity supply have been known to be postponed when a match extends into overtime.

We set up the shot by placing the ball so the novices would run from shade into a shaft of sunlight to provide a good contrast with the background. I wanted to get a low angle, and lay down flat in the dirt. That had secondary advantages that it got me close to the action and out of the way of our group of photographers standing behind, but required faith that I would not be hit by the ball or indeed, kicked by an over-enthusiastic monk.  Using a mild telephoto setting I pre-framed my composition estimating where the monks would be when they came out from the shadow, and set my camera to high-speed motor drive and AI servo focus. Then it was just a matter of hitting the shutter button when Daniel gave the command to 'GO', and looking to see later what I had captured.

A pair of photos this month - paired in terms of location and geometric composition and, as will be revealed below, by a minor lapse in my usual Photoshop ethics.

Both images were captured during a recent visit to Mono Lake. The first is a 'previsualized' composition, in that I had had this in mind for some time following an earlier trip up to the Log Cabin mine high in the mountains above Mono Lake. The rough dirt road to the mine accesses a spectacular viewpoint looking due east over the lake, and it occurred to me that this should provide a good astrophotography shot with the Milky Way arching above the lake early in the summer night. My trip provided a good opportunity to try out this idea, as the waxing moon would be only a few days old. Indeed, as the light faded after sunset the Milky Way emerged vividly bright in the clear, dark sky, aligned perfectly above the lake. The angle subtended by the arc of our galaxy was a little too broad to encompass even with my 14 mm lens on a full-frame camera, so I took several panned shots to later stitch together; taking care to facilitate this process by carefully leveling my tripod and positioning the horizon dead center. Exposure with the lens wide open (f 2.8) was a compromise, and I selected a shutter speed of 50 s to minimize streaking of star motion while maintaining a reasonable ISO of 3200.

The second image was composed near the shore of the lake a day later. Well after sunset, but while a little color remained low on the north-west horizon, an arc of whispy clouds appeared high in the sky. I think they are noctilucent clouds (high ice clouds in the mesosphere, visible only when illuminated by sunlight below the horizon), although it is unusual to see them so far South. The clouds presented a beautiful spectacle in themselves, and I was struck by the similar geometries of the atmospheric and galactic phenomena in my two photos.

Now, about that ethical lapse... On my drive up to Mono Lake I had stopped for the night on the volcanic tablelands above Bishop, and there met another photographer at the skyrock petroglyph. While waiting for the light, our conversation fell to discussing the use of Photoshop to construct composite images; for example to pair the sky from one image with landscape from another. I opined that such extreme manipulation was cheating, and that I did not do it! However, both the above images are in fact composites, but perhaps a sufficiently minor transgression to appease my conscience.

I took the shots for the Milky Way photo before the crescent moon had set, hoping that it would provide enough light to illuminate the lake, but a check of the camera screen showed that was not the case. To solve this problem I set my alarm for 4:30am, and re-photographed the exact same scene when the first glimmers of light and color appeared on the eastern horizon. A composite of the night and pre-dawn images thus provided both a sharp sky and a clearly outlined image of the lake with added color. The result looks perfectly natural, although it would not fool an astronomer.

I took the cloud photograph after I had returned to my campsite, several hundred yards from the lakeshore. Reviewing this later on the computer screen the image of the sky was captured nicely, but the lake was reduced to a mere sliverat this distance and the composition lacked any foreground interest. Thus, I thought to blend the cloud shot with a photo I had taken only minutes earlier while down at the lake.

So, two breaches of my usual ethics, but mitigated because in both instances the sky and land components of the composites were captured from essentially the same locations, looking in the same direction, and within minutes or a few hours of one another. Whatever, the final images are improved, and better convey my impressions of the scenes at the time.

Even by the standards of the Colorado Plateau, the Coyote Buttes in the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument contain some of the most intricate and fantastically colored sandstone formations on the planet. There are two sections of the Buttes; North and South. Although only a few miles apart they have different characters, and are accessed by very different routes. The North Coyote Buttes contains the famous 'Wave' formation, and while the trailhead is easily reached by a regular car, actually gaining access is difficult because of a permit system that is swamped by the large number of people wishing to  visit this popular area. Instead, I prefer the Southern area, in particular the Cottonwood Cove section. This sees few visitors, likely in part because it has no single iconic feature such as the Wave, but more so because access involves many miles of deep sandy trails necessitating a stout 4wd vehicle. Different to the Northern section, there are fewer wide sweeping vistas, but instead an intricate landscape with numerous intimate features to be discovered around every corner.

Among the most striking features are colorful striated bands that twist their way for hundreds of yards through the sandstone, crossing patches of pink and yellow 'brain' rock, and curving around teepee formations. The bands sometimes intersect isolated boulders and, even more remarkably, the banded striations continue through the boulders. This month's photo features the most spectacular of these striated boulders.

In composing the picture, my first, and most obvious aim was to place the boulder in context of the continuing stripe as it travelled across the level sandstone floor and then up and across colorful brain rock. One possibliity was a low shot, with the boulder in the foreground, and the brain rock as a distinct background with the curve of the stripe above and mirroring that of the stripe in the boulder itself. Instead, however, I took a higher viewpoint, positionined so that the stripe at the top of the boulder appeared to merge with its continuation on the rock floor. By tilting the camera I could then align the stripe to follow a classic sinusoidal curve, diagonalling across the frame to lead the eye from boulder to brain rock. Although the horizon ended up very crooked, that matters little here, as the subject is so abstract that there are few clues as to what actually is level. In full sunlight the scene is much too contrasty, with a deep shadow cast be the boulder. I thus waited until after shortly after sunset to take this shot, so the rock would be gently and uniformly illuminated by the warm light in the Western sky. 

Bonus photos: some other nearby striated boulders.

Did you know that the color of penguin poop can tell you what they are eating and how they are faring?  Pink-brown means that the penguins are eating plenty of shrimp or krill, which is usually abundant and easy to catch. If the guano is white, it means the penguins are eating fish, which is considerably harder to catch than krill, and therefore is energetically more expensive to eat. Finally, if the guano is green, the penguins are eating algae. This is usually the sign of a bad year for the penguins. [Link to Yahoo answers]

What's that got to do with photography?  Well, I was struck by the resemblance of these Antarctic gentoo penguin colonies to an old-fashioned sepia-toned print. The penguins were obviously doing well on a plentiful diet of shrimp or krill, and because our visit was early in the season the colonies were nicely isolated among pristine snowfields.

Antarctica offers an abundance of photographic subjects. Often too many; there is a temptation to take a few hasty shots and then move on because what you next encounter might be better than what is already in front of the lens. In this case, however, I thought the wide view of the colonies before the sea and background mountains was worth spending some time to wander around on the lookout for a good composition. A small rock shelf offered a higher viewpoint, and I was happy to find a pool near the edge. Sea shells in the pool added foreground interest, and with a polarizer to reduce glare from the water they showed up well, with a complementary color matching the penguin poop.

The final image has a muted color palette, which does indeed achieve my notion of a sepia-print effect. In terms of composition, I placed the camera so that the diagonal line of the rock would trace the outline of the near colony and divide the picture into two, yet with the curve of the shells creating a leading line toward the colony to unify foreground and background. My usual approach when selecting subjects and compositions is to simplify as much as possible; to reduce the photograph to its essentials. It is much easier to create  an effective result in that way. Here, however, there is quite a lot going on - mountains, penguins, the isolated sepia 'islands', lichen, shells - with no single feature to arrest the eye.  But having followed a route of increasing simplification for several years, I sometimes try to reverse course and experiment with greater complexity.  This month's photo, I think, does hang together despite including several disparate elements. Viewed at a distance, or as a small thumbnail, the overall pattern is attractive. A close-up view reveals interesting details to explore.

If you have ever driven up Highway 1 between LA and SanFrancisco, you will likely identify the above photo as having been taken at Big Sur, even though no recognizable landscape features are present in the image. Instead, the tall fronds of grass are a conspicuous sight along Big Sur coastline, scattered densely across the steep hillsides falling to the ocean. Pampas grass is iconic of Big Sur in the same way the tumbleweed is to the desert southwest: although, curiously, neither plant is native to the U.S., originating respectively in the Andes and Eurasia.

My aim in creating this picture was to capture the feeling of an early, winter morning high above the Big Sur coastline in a simplified, semi-abstract manner. Just three elements - the grasses, a fogbank out across the ocean, and whispy clouds echoing the curves of the grass.

I had camped out for the night along the Nacimiento-Fergusson road which ascends into the mountains through the Los Padres National Forest, and drove down at first light to a switchback a few hundred feet above the main highway that provides a sweeping view north and south along the coastline. That morning the beaches were obscured by fog, so instead of attempting grand scenic compositions I focused on more intimate details, using the fog as a backdrop to isolate the grasses. After wandering up and down the road I found a clump of fronds that were relatively clear of surrounding weeds and clutter, and set up my camera with the tripod fully extended so they would be framed entirely agains the fog, without intercepting the horizon line. The sky looked as if it would provide an interesting counterpoint to the grasses, but I had to wait a while before the rising sun brought some color. By that time, the cloud formation had drifted and no longer lined up well, so I took two shots, panning round to center the clouds so I could later align them in Photoshop.

For the final composition I chose to place the horizon dead center; deliberately breaking the usual commandment to avoid symmetry and follow the 'rule' of thirds. I thought the sky deserved equal precedence with the land, and thus arranged them as if a dyptic - two images that could each stand alone, but in combination evoke a certain tension yet complemented and echoed one another.

Among the many millions of digital photos that are taken every day, how can one hope to create an image that is unique in some way?

One approach depends upon the photographers skills and vision; applying a unique composition or perspective before pressing the shutter button, or specialized subsequent post-processing. Another way is simply to be present (with a camera!) at a unique place, preferably under unique conditions. This month's photo is an example of the latter case, and was taken at St. Andrew's Bay in South Georgia, at about the same time as the featured photo for December 2013. Few people are fortunate to be able to visit the vast king penguin colonies on South Georgia, and a landing at St. Andrew's Bay was to be a 'big day' on our Ultimate Antarctica tour with Jo van Os. As it transpired our time with the penguins was cut short by the development of fierce katabatic winds which, however, gave the opportunity to photograph under extreme conditions as the wind kicked up a sandstorm on the black sand beach.

The following excerpt from the trip logbook of Jo van Os tells the story...

November 14, 2014—St. Andrews Bay

At 0300, Monika and Joe Van Os had scoped out the early morning weather situation. The sky was filled with broken clouds, a photogenic sunrise looked possible, the wind was favorable for a landing, and wave swell was moderate. Our landing was a “go.” By 0400 we commenced the landing on the legendary beach at St. Andrews Bay. Just prior to our departure, “bio-secure” breakfast sandwiches and snacks were available in the ship’s lounge to eat on board or to take ashore.

By 0430 the 50 participants who opted for the early morning landing were ashore and experiencing the spectacle of St. Andrews—the largest king penguin colony on South Georgia and the island’s largest and most populated elephant seal beach. Safety instructions were given as well as rules for the engagement of wildlife on this sweeping 1.8-mile (3 km) long beach. Clouds forming on the low horizon precluded a dramatic sunrise. People fanned out in all directions, some heading to the far distance to visit the king penguins, others working the shoreline where penguins were heading out to sea for their morning foraging expeditions, while several photographers concentrated on fighting and mating elephant seals. Still others headed into the interior to shoot introduced reindeer before their expected removal from the island, sometime in 2014.

By 0600 the wind had picked up strongly with hints of katabatic gusts blowing bursts of dry sand across the beach. This barely dampened the spirits of our photographers and most kept on shooting—unfazed.

By 0700 the beach and the bay were experiencing a full-blown gale. Strong westerly winds and 60-70 mph katabatic gusts created blasting sandstorms across the beach and our safety became more of a concern as Joe Van Os, on shore, and Monika, aboard the Ushuaia, monitored the situation. The 0800 landing for our remaining passengers who had stayed onboard for breakfast was postponed due to the hazard of mounting sea swell on the ship’s gangway and the possibility of drenching waves during the Zodiac operation. Despite the blowing sand, photography on shore continued and unique images of South Georgia wildlife emerging from a fog of blowing sand were undoubtedly created. It is a testament to the quality of today’s camera equipment, that little damage to cameras and lenses by the blowing sand was reported.

By 0900 it was obvious that, despite inviting blue skies and sunshine, the persistent strongly gusting wind presented a safety issue and the entire shore party was collected and gathered together for an orderly departure from the beach. With a potential threat of a Zodiac flipping by the off-shore wind, several staff or seamen remained in the Zodiac as human ballast for the return trip from ship to shore after passengers were offloaded. By 1000 all passengers and staff were back on board Ushuaia.

Another 'atmospheric' photo for this month's selection - one taken at the other end of the Earth from January's photo. Indeed, within just three months we have visited both arctic and antarctic regions, returning a week ago from Iceland.

Winter is a special time in Iceland. Tourists are few, the landcape is snow-covered, and the light from the low sun can be gorgeous. And, there is always the chance of seeing the aurora borealis. That chance, though, tends to be low; even though the solar cycle is now near its peak. During three visits over the past three years we have seen the aurora on only three nights. Our first visit yielded the brightest and most spectacular displays, but at the time we were driving on a desolate section of road lacking any interesting foreground subject to add interest to photographs. Our second visit yielded nothing. So, maybe third time lucky this year? The Icelandic Met Office has an excellent website predicting auroral activity and showing cloud cover across the island. All looked good for the second night after we had arrived in Iceland, with auroral activity predicted at 5 on a 0-9 scale and clear skies - but then, just as it got dark, the activity prediction was abruptly dropped to 1 (quiet). The next few days were socked-in, with heavy cloud cover and gale-force winds. Only on our penultimate night in Iceland did there seem a good chance seeing good auroral displays, and that required an unplanned drive of 200 km from Reykjavik to an anticipated window of clear sky over South Iceland.

On the roadI was thinking about possible locations location that might provide interesting terrestrial foregrounds to complement photos of the aurora, and decided to head for the black sand beaches near the small town of Vik. The latitude of Iceland is sufficiently high that the aurora typically appears almost overhead, rather than low on the northern horizon. . To the east I could then hope to capture auroral dsplays over the sea stacks of Reynisdrangar; to the west the promentary of Dyrholaey with its summit lighthouse; and to the north the Mýrdalsjökull glacier. After a meal of excellent lamb cutlets at the N1 gas station in Vik we settled into our sleeping bags in the back of our rental SUV. My iPod chimed Marimba at 4:00am, when the half-full moon had diped below the horizon, and a glimpse through the iced up windows showed stars and a hint of green; promising enough to don Muckboots and antarctic clothing and wriggle out into the freezing but still night.

I had expected that the best aurora was likely to be to the north, over the glacier and with the possibility of capturing reflections in the lagoon between the beach and mainland.Instead, activity seemed to be concentrated in an arc stretching directly overhead, so I walked some way along the beach to get some distance from the cliffs that blocked the view to the east. Then, it was a matter of deciding how close to the ocean I dared set my tripod. I wanted to frame shots with surf in the foreground to reflect the auroral light, but was well aware that infrequent and unpredictable rogue waves might carry surprisingly far up the beach and swamp over the top of my boots. As it happened, I stayed dry and had to grab the camera and run for it only once. I stayed out for about three hours, taking hundreds of shots as the auroral patterns constantly changed while trying to capture good displays timed to coincide with nice patterns of receding surf and the rotaion of the lighthouse beam. The photo above is my favorite from the night, as it includes both red and green auroara together with arcing and ray-like formations.

For a few minutes I also noticed a very different pattern of auroral activity that I had not seen before; several discrete tear-drop patches of green that were asynchronously pulsing in intensity with a period of a few seconds.A Google search for 'pulsing aurora' revealed that I was lucky to observe this relatively rare phenomenon, whose mechanism has been elucidated in a recent Science paper.

Some technical notes.

I was photographing using a Canon 5D Mk3 camera with a 14 mm f2.8 Rokinon lens. The latter is an excellent choice for auroral photography. Aurorae span over a vast are of the sky so a super-wide lens is best, and although the Rokinon lens costs less than a sixth of the Canon equivalent, its quality is very high. Although it lacks any electronic controlsof focus or aperture that is not a limitation for night-time photography as the lens needs to be used wide-open anyway, and can be pre-set to focus on infinity (which actually reads close to the 10 ft mark on my lens!). Perhaps the main limitation with the Rokinon lens is its wierd 'mustache' distortion, but although that is a big problem for architectureal photography, no one is going to notice if aurorae are distorted! Auroral displays change surprisingly rapidly, and my experience is that exposure times longer than about 4 s blur the finer details. For very bright displays that is not a problem, but although the aurorae were beautiful this night, they were relatively dim, necessitating an ISO setting of 12,000 even with an f2.8 lens. By eye the greens were vivid, but although the camera captured the reds I could not see them at the time.

Nearing the end of our Antarctic voyage, I woke early on Nov. 24 and was on deck well before the wake-up call for breakfast. We had cruised the previous day through the Lemaire Channel under heavily overcast skies, but this morning sunlight was streaming through breaks in the clouds and the air was completely still. I was greeted by the calmest, silky waters that we had seen on the entire trip, which appeared inky black, and became even more so when photographed through a polarizer. The only disruption was the ships wake as we cruised at low speed, making beautiful ripples highlighted by reflections from the snow-covered shoreline of Paradise Bay. I was occupied creating semi-abstract compositions of the ripple patterns when a rainbow began to appear below some brooding clouds. By good chance, the rainbow was almost dead astern, and as the ship's course began a gradual turn the wake began to curve around to line up nicely with the rainbow's end. Then, it was just a matter of waiting and taking several 'insurance' shots while hoping that the rainbow would not fade before the ship moved into an optimal alignment. In fact, the right half of the rainbow did disappear. Nevertheless I preferred to frame the shot as a wider landscape view rather than cropping to portrait orientation to encompass only the illuminated segment of the arc. I feel that the snow-covered hill and its reflection give a horizontal balance to the vertical symmetry of the rainbow and wake and help communicate a sense of place; while the mirror-calm water adds contrast to the ripple patterns.

As promised, penguins for this month's photo. Rather delayed, as I am working through a backlog of nearly 10,000 photos taken on a trip to Antartica and South Georgia.

This picture was taken on what was probably the best day of our voyage - certainly the most exciting day. We had landed at 4:00 am at St. Andrew's bay on South Georgia. The early start was in anticipation of a golden sunrise, but that was not to happen. Nevertheless, the overcast light was great for photographing the (literally) hundreds of thousands of king penguins in colonies stretching along the beach and up toward the glaciers. Through the morning the weather worsened, and by about 10:00 am katabatic winds were gusting up to about 60 mph. We were signalled by the ship's horn to return immeiately to the landing site to evacuate the beach, but no one heard the signal over the roar of the wind , and people gradually straggled back having decided on their own that conditions were getting bad. Only a single zodiac was operating to ferry us, and that needed two extra crew members at all times to act as ballast to avoid flipping over in the strong surf, so I was waiting a long time to return to the ship.

However, that did provide for some exceptional photographic possibilities. The wind was so strong that it was difficult to remain standing, or to hold the camera steady, but the penguins appeared quite unfazed. Dense groups of king penguins weere still waddling down the beach through a sandstorm and swimming out through the surf and blowing spray. As usual, bad weather made for good photography, and this image captures something of the arduous environment in which these plucky and entertaining birds live.

Just a quick catch--up for November, as I have been away for a month in Antarctica and South Georgia. December's photo should be posted soon, featuring penguins or icebergs!

The photo was taken on a trip along Owens Valley timed to catch fall colors in the cottonwoods and aspens. I had been photographing sunrise at Mono Lake, and was driving along highway 350 toward the famous Whoa Nelli Deli near Lee Vining for breakfast. A low cloud/mist had come down over the mountains, completely hiding the Sierras, although the valley was in bright sunshine. But very suddenly the mist began to dissipate, revealing lines of golden cottonwoods curving along the stream courses, and crisp mountain slopes dusted with recent snowfall. I stopped to photograph through gaps in the mist but, as usual, the problem was to find some foreground interest. A few miles further a dilapidated shack, conveniently placed right by the road, nicely filled that need. The photo above is basically just a 'grab shot', taken without much premeditation. I did try a few different compositions, altering the placement and perspective of the shack relative to the mountains, but the first ended up being the best. A polarizer helped bring out the colors and the contrast of the mist against the sky, and I needed to do very little work in post-processing other than cloning out some obtrusive fence posts.

The theme of a weatherbeaten shack/hut/barn against snowcovered mountains is a veenerable photographic cliche; but I have to admit quite liking this photo, and a print of it hanging outside my office door has gained more appreciative comments than have most of my more deliberately-formuated photographs.

Another photo from the archives (taken four years ago this month), and another example of trying to come up with something new from a much-photographed location.

The picture was taken from John Ford's point along the loop road through Monument Valley; a scene made famous in many Western movies. The landscape with all those orange/red sandstone buttes and mesas is spectacular, but they need something else added to make a good picture. Often, that something involves some diligent searching to pick out a sufficiently interesting foreground subject from the generallydesolate desert floor. The pair of rocks by the parking lot at the visitor center have fulfilled that purpose for generations of photographers from Ansel Adems on! On this day, however, the late monsoon season weather was putting on a good show, and the rapidly changing sky was rivalling the landscape for visual impact. The wonderful, frilly-edged cloud in this month's photo developed quickly while I was some way from my car, with only a mid-range 'walk-around' lens on the camera. Even with the lens fully zoomed out the cloud was too big to fit into a single frame. Not wanting to risk losing the shot by going back to get a wide lens, I took three overlapping vertical frames to stitch together afterwards. In addition to blending the images in Photoshop, I did some post-processing to give more depth to the foreground. As originally captured, the lighting here was rather even and flat. To create a more three-dimensional feel I copied an artifice used on some topographic maps, lightening elevated areas and darkening shaded slopes.

Back again to the archives for this month's photo - a favorite from several years ago, a print of which hangs on our wall at home.

The photo was taken from Alstom point - a long, bumpy ride along a dirt road to a high promentory with superb views across Lake Powell. The lake is not really a 'lake', but rather a giant reservoir impounding the waters of the Colorado river and swamping what used to be Glen Canyon. The reservoir began to fill in 1963 following completion of Glen Canyon dam, and reached its high water mark in 1980, overtopping the spillway. Since then drought conditions caused the water level to fall precipitously, reaching a low point in the winter of 2005. Photographs taken during high water years show red and yellow sandstone cliffs forming a color contrast with the deep blue of the lake, but more recently the scene is marred by the bathtub ring left on the rocks by the receding water. My visit was in 2006, when the water had dropped about 150 ft below its high point.

Nevertheless, a good sunset with the wind in the right direction to blow away pollution from the Navajo power plant produced a spectacular vista of glowing sandstone. After taking the requisite picture postcard scenic shots, I started looking for different and less literal ways to to capture and communicate the scene by using a long telephoto lens to isolate tiny sections. Golden reflections from the sunlit Gunsight Butte directly across Padre Bay caught my eye, and zooming in revealed a tiny island that had recently emerged from the depths as the water level receded. I framed the shot to exclude the cliffs (and the bathtub ring), creating an almost abstract composition consisting almost entirely of diffuse reflections with the island as the only solid, sharp subject. Light winds were constantly changing the patterns of the reflections, so I took several shots over a few minutes, ultimately selecting one where a band of still water below the island framed a reflection of the very top of the butte.

My hope is that this photo works on multiple levels: as an almost abstract composition of colors and form with the island providing just enough clue as to the physical setting; and as a metaphor for our reliance on the erratic and unpredicable flow of the Colorado river. The water level rose almost 60 ft over five yearsfrom the date of my photo , but has now (2013) dropped back to about the same level. The little island will be once more emergent!

A return to the archives for this month's photo. I usually select a recent image, but I realised I had never featured anything from Easter Island; a place that is very high among the most evocative locations I and my wife have been fortunate to visit.

Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is the most isolated inhabited island on earth. This lonely place contains one of the world's most spectacular .collections of archaeological wonders - the moai or stone statues. These were largely carved at a single quarry, rano raraku, where they can still be seen in various states of completion. Many.mysteries remain, however, regarding how they were transported miles across the rugged terrain of the volcanic island, and how they were finally errected on the ceremonial platforms (ahu). All the moai (except those remaining to be transported from the quarry) were toppled during tribal battles soon after the first European discovery of the island in 1722, but some, notably at Tahai, Tongariki, and Ahu Aviki have been restored in modern times.

Our preferred time to visit the moai was well before dawn. There were no fences or forbidding signs, and the moai at rano raraku are left in much the state as when they were abandoned by their makers. We could walk among and right up to the moai, and at that time of the morning there were no other people. Just a few peacable wild horses, who made good use of the sharp chins of the moai to scratch the backs of their necks. Sitting on the grass under the dim sillhouettes of the moai in the cool stillness there was a very tangible sense that the ancient peoples who carved these figures were somehow still present: a slightly shivery feeling that I have experienced also on hiking to remote and little-known Anasazi ruins on the Colorado plateau. This sense of 'connectedness' to a place or time can only happen with quiet and solitude. Sites such as Mesa Verde and Angkor Wat, with their teeming tourists and regimented tours, strike me as only a more authentic Disneyland. The architecture, craftsmanship and sheer scale are impressive, but I find more emotional connection and reward from discovering even a small granary or single room Anasazi dwelling. Perhaps the isolation of Rapa Nui will protect it from development and over-visitation?

Back to the photograph. How to convey something of this feeling in a mere flat image? For most of the photographs I took of Rapa Nui - including the most successful ones - I used light-painting to highlight the moai against a moonlit or dawn-light landscape. This approach retains a sense of mystery that is lacking in full daylight, and gives more control to bring out features in the carving and provide a three-dimensionality. I used a halogen dive-light, which gives a powerful yet diffuse beam with a more pleasingly warm color balance than led flashlights. The photo is of one of the moai on the slopes of the rano raraku quarry, fully carved and upright, but now waiting for eternity to be transported to its intended ahu.

I was honored when my photo was chosen by Pavel Pavel for the front cover of his book describing experiments revealing how the moai were transported from the quarry to their final destinations.

"Local legend says that the statues arrived at their current locations by themselves - that they actually 'walked'. Several expeditions visited the island during the last century, trying to work out how the early Easter Islanders transported the moai statues. When the Norwegian explorer and archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl announced his plans to conduct more field work on Easter Island in 1986, he did not know his expedition would be joined by a young Czech engineer, Pavel Pavel, who would eventually make the moai statues walk.

Mr Pavel had followed the research and experiments on Easter Island since 1981 and came up with a theory. With the help of his friends he cast a 4.5 metre tall concrete statue weighing 12 tonnes. In the South Bohemian town of Strakonice, they conducted a trial. They fastened ropes around the top of the head as well as around the base of the bust and through a system of tilting and twisting Mr Pavel and sixteen other people were able to move the statue forward. In this manner the experimental moai wriggled forward as if it were "walking". Whereas 180 people pulling a statue on its back had been used during Thor Heyerdahl's experiment on Easter Island in 1956, only 17 people were needed for Pavel to transport a "walking moai".

Thor Heyerdahl invited Pavel Pavel to join the KonTiki Museum expedition to Easter Island in January 1986 to try out his experiments on an original statue. It worked well and the mystery was solved" - or maybe not quite?

Ponte della Maddalena (Italian: "Bridge of Mary Magdalene") is a bridge crossing the Serchio river near the town of Borgo a Mozzano in the Italian province of Lucca. One of numerous medieval bridges known as Ponte del Diavolo, the "Bridge of the Devil", it was a vital river crossing on the Via Francigena, an early medieval road and important mediaeval pilgrimage route to Rome for those coming from France. The bridge is a remarkable example of medieval engineering, probably commissioned by the Countess Matilda of Tuscany circa 1080-1100. It was renovated circa 1300 under the direction of Castruccio Castracani. The largest span is 37.8 m. (Wikipedia)

This spectacular bridge ranked high among the list of attractive subjects I hoped to photograph during a recent visit to Tuscany, but it presented some problems in creating a good image. However, photographic difficulties are basis for many of my selections as 'Photo of the Month'. Just occasionally I might find a great subject under great lighting, so that all that is required is to press the shutter and upload the photo with very little post-processing needed. But then there is nothing much to write about... In this instance the difficulties lay in both composition and lighting. Access is severely hindered by a railway running along the west (left) bank of the river, and by a narrow, busy road along the east. The only safe place to set up a tripod was from a small parking area, from where I tried to get the best possible view from the top of the parapet. Not actually difficult, but I felt constrained in having little freedom to compose the shot.

The second aspect concerned the lighting. During a first mid-day visit under full sunlight the bridge looked rather mundane and lost in its surroundings. Noticing floodlights mounted along the river banks I had better expectations for a night shot, and we returned during the late evening anticipating a time when the remaining natural light might balance the floodlit bridge. The question then was whether the floodlights would actually be turned on. For several frustrating minutes they remained off, while the remaining light in the sky faded. Eventually one, two and finally all four lights came on but, even more frustratingly, they would erratically extinguish and re-ignite. I wanted a long (30s) exposure to blur the ripples in the river and get a nice reflection, and took several shots before getting one where all the lights remained on. But then a further problemn was that the lights on the far side of the bridge were deep orange mercury bulbs, whereas the near-side lights were of a much higher color temperature. Even on the camera lcd screen it was horribly apparent that the lighting on the bridge came out as a lurid and most unattractive green with a white balance setting that gave a realistic blue sky and pleasing orange backlight. Producing the final image thus took some time in Photoshop, principally using a masked layer to selectively adjust the color temperature of the bridge where it was illuminated by the white-green floodlights.

The tufa towers in Mono Lake were created underwater, and are visible only because much of the water flowing into the lake was diverted to the thirsty mouths of Los Angeles. By themselves the tufa formations are intriguing, but in harsh sunlight photographs come out looking very mundane. Around dawn and dusk it is a different matter, and the lake can take on a very otherworldly appearance. Even then, though, the lighting matters very much, and a dramatic sky really helps complement the tufa as a strong second subject. On a recent trip to the lake I was thus heartened to see a classic 'Sierra Wave' cloud formation developing over Owens Valley. I arrived at the South Tufa area in the late afternoon, when the bright edge of the cloud provided nice silhouettes against the tufa pinnacles; but the pallette was almost monochrome. The real action would have to wait until close to sunset, and I had good hopes as the sky to the west was completely clear.

The photo above took some pre-planning. I wanted to make the cloud an equal co-star with the tufa, but its north-south orientation did not line up well with the most attractive formations. After some wandering around I settled on the formation pictured above, waded out into the lake (having thought to bring my wellies) to get clear reflections without the clutter of stones and mud at the lake edge, and set up camera and tripod. I took several shots as the light changed toward sunset, but at that time the tufa appeared as just a black silhoutte. So, I waited as the light faded, until it was dark enough to be able to use a powerful Maglite led flashlight to 'light-paint' the tufa. A gel over the flashlight nicely warmed the color of the rock, and a 30s exposure both gave time to evenly illuminate the formation and blur the waves in the lake into a silken, reflective sheen. The final image is thus a blend of two shots, taken about an hour apart, and manually merged in Photoshop.

Bryce Canyon must be high on the list of the most visited national parks in the US. The eroded hoodoo formations are striking and iconic, but it is the lighting that makes Bryce truly unique.

This comes about because Bryce is not really a canyon, but rather a series of east-facing amphitheaters. The viewpoints are up on the rim, so you are looking down onto the formations, and directly into the rising sun. Such backlighting would normally cause big problems for photography, because the intense direct light from the sun would overwhelm and render foreground subjects as mere sillhouettes. But here the downward angle of view allows the sun to be excluded from the frame, so that the hoodoos fall within a sensible exposure range. The real magic though is created by reflected light. Bryce is at an altitude of over 8000 ft, and catches the very first rays of the rising sun. That soft red light then diffusely reflects off the white and orange sands of the amphitheater, illuminating the hoodoos so that they almost seem to glow with an inner light.

It is easy - too easy - to come away from Bryce with a collection of excellent photos. It is much harder to come away with anything original. The walls of the visitor center and Ruby's Inn are lined with spectacular and inspiring photographs; the challenge is to find something a little different. I usually pass by Bryce two or three times a year. It lies a one-days drive from my home, and I often stop there overnight on my way to or from destinations further in Utah. I can camp for free in the forest immediately outside the National Park boundary, sleep in until just a few minutes before sunrise, and still get to one of the overlooks in time for frst light. On recent visits I have concentrated on using a long telephoto lens to abstract distant features, rather than focusing on the iconic and much-photographed formations directly below the rim. This month's photo was taken with a 400 mm lens, looking across from Sunset Point toward features in Fairy Canyon. By eye these appeared insignificant and lost in the bright sunlight, but through the viewfinder they shone with a mysterious luminescence. To get a sharp image I used a tripod, switched on live view to act a a mirror lockup, and selected a 10s timer delay to let any vibrations die down after pressing the shutter button. That delay also allowed me to move round and use a hand to shield the lens from direct sun, as the lens hood alone did not completely block the light. Even so, the image out of the camera appeared rather washed out, mostly due to haze in the air over the long distance at which the shot was taken. However, global and local adjustments in Photoshop brought up the contrast nicely, allowing the glowing hoodoos to really 'pop' againt the shadowed background.

On a recent trip over the University holiday I journeyed through southern Utah at the end of March. I was hoping that spring would already have arrrived - that the cottonwoods would be fluorescent green and the fruit trees in Capitol Reef would be in blossom. But no; the tail end of winter lingered on, and all the trees were bare. However, that can make for some attractive photographs, particularly in redrock country where backlit branches stand out against the dark, shadowed canyon walls.

The subjects in this photo are a pair of ancient, wonderfully twisted and intertwined oak trees, growing in a meadow close to the old barn in Capitol Reef National Park. I was there early in the morning, soon after the sun had risen above the canyon wall. Looking directly into the sun, the backlighting accentuated the tangles of small branches, while reflected light made the trunks positively glow. I wanted to frame the scene in an almost abstract manner, and wandered around exploring various combinations of position and focal length to find a composition that would eliminate everything apart from the trees themselves. Flare from the sun shining directly into the lens was a problem, but easily fixed by removing my usual in-situ polarizer and using a hand as a shade.

The end result is a rather complex photograph, without any single focal subject, but I feel it succeeds as an interesting mix of textures and colors, and as a sort of visual maze. The trees are so intertwined, that it is fun to try to trace out which branch belongs to which tree!

To be effective, a photograph needs to have at least two distinct elements. One is (usually) the subject of the photograph - what you are photographing. But, to have any deeper meaning or 'wow' factor there needs to be something extra. In the case of wildlife photography there is a natural progression. At first it is satisfying merely to capture a decent static portrait of a new bird or animal. After all, that is difficult enough as the subject is inclined to fly or run away. Soon, however, there is an urge to shoot more intersting pictures; for example, the challenge may become that of catching interesting behaviors or composing to place the subject in the context of its environment. And, as exemplified by the title of my website, a common theme in my photography is to capture a chosen subject under optimal light.

During our visit to Etosha National Park last summer there was no shortage of spectacular Namibian wildlife, but lighting was problematic. Access to the park is strictly regulated, and everyone has to be within the fenced camps at night. The gates open and close strictly at sunrise and sunset, so we always seemed to be spending the times of golden light waiting for the gate to open, or driving frantically back to camp before it shut. One evening, though, we returned early, and went down to the viewing area by the waterhole. The main attraction here is watching animals approach at night under floodlights, but the waterhole at Okaukeujo also gave a good view across the surrounding plains, looking directly toward the setting sun. As animals walked toward the waterhole they kicked up dust cloud, which caught the light as the sun sank to a red orb in the thick African air.

This month's photo was taken on an Ice Cave tour guided by Einar at Local Guides. We visited Iceland in December, and the weather was heavily overcast and raining on ther first day we met up with him. Although the ice cave we visited was architecturally impressive, it lacked any real color. However, by the next morning the sky was clear, and Einar took us to a much more beautiful cave, with a second entrance that aligned with the rising sun to create a wonderful golden glow contrasting with the blues and greens of light filtering through the ice.

Ice caves present some unique photographic problems, and as this was my first time, I was not sure how best to solve them. The space is confined, so I took my widest lens, a 14mm on a full-frame camera (Canon 5DIII). Then, to handle the extreme contrast range I bracketed 3 exposures for each shot at 2-stop intervals, and manually blended these to create the final image. Perhaps the biggest problem though was finding and setting up good compositions. To get a wide field of view I found that I mostly had the camera hard up against the back wall of the cave, making it difficult to see what was in the frame through either the viewfinder of the live-view screen. Compounding that, the floor of the cave alternated between irregular blocks of slippery ice, glutinous black moraine dirt and silty, ice-cold water, making avoidance of injury and immersion a higher priority than optimizing the camera angle.

Enough excuses! The photo above was my favorite, and perhaps the only one where I can claim a deliberate composition, rather than a random shot hoping that a super-wide lens would capture something interesting. My aim was to combine the diagonal slant of the ice formations together with contrasting colors progressing from white through green and blue to gold. As a neuroscientist, the bizzare, brainlike formation at the top right appealed to me, and I framed the shot to juxtapose it against the golden light entering through the lower tunnel and highlighting the group of figures. I usually don't include people in my landscape work, but here I felt that they helped (indeed, were vital) to provide scale to what would othervise be an utterly abstract scene.

Last month's photo was a deliberately blurry bird against a black background. For contrast, this month features a sharp shot of a bird againt a white background.

The image was captured during a recent visit to Bosque del Apache, where the over-wintering sandhill cranes take pride of place on the wildlife reserve. My visit coincided with the annual Festival of the Cranes, so the photographer count was also very high; and the density of white super-telephoto lenses correspondingly great. My longest lens is a 100-400mm, and I was feeling quite out-gunned by massive 600 and 800mm rigs on gimbal mounts, but took advantage of my much lighter set-up by concentrating on hand-held shots of birds in flight. I had both 7D and 5D MkIII cameras with me, and was interested to compare their respective merits for this type of photography. The crop-factor 7D gave me an equivalent 640mm lens for tighter framing, but the focus on the 5D is much nicer, and its lower noise allowed use of higher ISO settings corresponding to about a 2-stop faster shutter speed.

Cranes are elegant, if gangly birds, and although they are somewhat skittish and difficult to approach closely, they compensate for that in sheer size with wingspans up to 7 ft. Nevertheless, I ended up with many hundreds of shots of cranes and only a few 'keepers'. Other than choosing a location from which to shoot, relative to the wind direction and the , pond or field to which the birds are approaching, there is not much you can do in terms of deliberately composing a photo. Everything is happening too fast, and it is just a matter of firing off a burst of shots and seeing later what you might have captured. Any editorial and artistic comesafterwards in terms of selecting the best images and processing them.

Two features of this month's photo appealed to me. Firstly, the bird was positioned against a uniformly white sky. Often, it works well to include some (out-of-focus) background for perspective, but here I liked being able to abstract the crane and present it against a pure white backdrop simply by tweaking the highlight levels. Secondly, I liked the graceful curves of the nearmost wing and feathers. The exposure and sharpness were good straight out of the camera, and the only other processing I applied was to lighten the underside of the far wing to bring out more detail, and to subtly increase the color saturationand warmth.

My selection of this month's photo was triggered by a recent article by Mike Johnson in The Online Photographer, in which he contrasts the notion of image quality with image properties.

"What does that mean? When it comes to photographs, a "property" is what I call "quality" without the value judgment attached. And with a much broader range of possibilities. Sharpness is the most highly prized, the most widely accepted, image virtue. But who says an image has to be sharp? Some are, some aren't. Some sharp images look like crap and some sharp images look great. Unsharp images, ditto—sometimes that can look good, sometimes not. It depends.

Sharpness is a property that suits some pictures and not others. Some photographers treat it like a virtue, as if possessing more of it confers ever more glory and honor upon them. Granted, it's somewhat more difficult to make a photograph work when it suffers from unvirtuous properties—you have to be sensitive to the effect those properties have, the way they function visually, and how well they suit a particular picture and its message, instead of being just plain clueless about all those things. And in order to achieve the virtuous properties, your equipment, materials, and techniques need to be capable of it. There is a certain—slight—honor in that, I suppose."

So, I present an image that is almost completely blurred: deliberately unvirtuous in quality, but I think virtuous in properties. At least, I like the final result - but you can decide whether there is honor to be attributed.

As is often the case, the actual taking of the shot was a mix of planning and serendipity; and being an action shot of a bird, the balance was shifted toward the latter. I had set off well before dawn to drive to Huntington Beach, intending to photograph the offshore oil rigs at sunrise before continuing on to the bird reserve at Bolsa Chica. But the parking meters along PCH were blocked off, so I arrived at Bolsa Chica earlier than intended. The light was still dim, requiring a high ISO setting and long shutter speed to get any photos at all. Of necessity I thus decided to try for motion blur photographs of the birds. Happily, a snowy egret obliged by coming in to land in front of dark foliage close by. I was able to pan my camera along its approach, and grabbed a couple of shots of its final approach. Looking through the viewfinder at birds in flight everything is changing too fast to know what shots you are going to get, but reviewing the image afterwards on the camera screen showed one promising frame.

The main attraction in this month's photo is the light: the crepescular rays ("God-rays") radiating out into the sky. These are formed (Wikipedia reference) 'from a single point in the sky, specifically, where the sun is. The rays, which stream through gaps in clouds or between other objects, are columns of sunlit air separated by darker cloud-shadowed regions.' To make them visible, there must be something in the air (e.g. mist, particulate matter) to diffract and scatter the sunlight. In this case the dramatic rays were created by the thick, hazy layer of dust that was continually present during our recent visit to Namibia. Most of the time I regarded this as a nuiscance, because it rendered sunrises and sunsets very muted and robbed long-distance views of contrast. But, on one day the sky filled with clouds, and the haze redeemed itself by bringing these rays into being.

Crepescular rays are, in fact, parallel to one another (the sun is a long distance away!), but because of perspective appear to diverge from a vanishing point; an effect that becomes more pronounced when the sun is near the horizon. I had been watching the rays through the afternoon as they became more dramatic and colorful with the approach of sunset, and was on the lookout for a suitable forground to supply a terrestrial reference. Not so easily found in the arid Namib desert, but fortunately we were close to an excellent example of an Aloe dichotema (quiver tree) with exposed forking branches forming a nice mathematical series.

In terms of composition I usually like to keep thinks very simple, and that was very easy here because, apart from the one tree, there was absolutely nothing else for miles around in the barren desert to clutter up the photo. I used a 24 mm lens to encompass a wide swath of the sky and got low to the ground to sillhouett the tree agains the light. The only remaining issue was then the framing and positioning of the tree in relation to the rays. Given the radial symmetry of the light the obvious solution was to place everything dead center, though I did take other shots as insurance in case I later preferred an offset composition. [I could have wished for a reflecting pool below the tree to create a perfectly circularly symmetrical image: but as this was the dry season in one of the most arid countries in the world, that was not a possibility!]. Of course, one of the first 'rules' of composition states that you should never place the main subject in the center, but my experience is that it gives extra emphasis when a subject allows me to spectacularly break the rule.

The taking of the photo was straightforward, as the sun was hidden behind the clouds and attenuated by the haze, so there was no need for a graduated ND filter. But, on opening up the RAW file, the imaged looked too 'flat', failing to capture the vivid scene I remembered. Even after some global tweaking to apply an S curve to enhance contrast it still did not 'pop'. As a final step to bring out the rays I duplicated the image, applied a quite strong unsharp mask with wide radius to bring up the local contrast on the background layer, and then selectively painted through transparency on the top layer using a soft brush to bring out the rays without exaggerating the clouds or tree.

Any photograph can be analyzed in terms of four essential elements: subject, composition, lighting and post-processing. Their relative importance may vary enormously. Sometimes, as in much journalistic photography, the subject is all-important, and any manipulation after the fact is strictly taboo. Sometimes the lighting is the main point, and the subject is merely secondary. Sometimes a striking alignment or geometry in the composition takes precedence. As for post processing, I would rank that last. I am suspicious of attempts to generate a striking image in Photoshop starting from an unpromising original capture.

Although an outstanding image might capitalize on only one of the above elements, it obviously helps if all four contribute in their different ways. Which brings me to this month's photo of the month, taken during a recent trip to Namibia. The subject is clearly the star attraction, but I hope I have been able to add more by careful choice of lighting conditions, composition and processing.

Subject. The photo is of the Deadvlei ('dead lake') within the Sossusvlei sand dunes of Namibia. This is a clay pan, formed during an earlier time when ephemeral rainwater pools allowed camel thorn trees to grow. When the climate changed, drought hit the area killing the trees, which are estimated to be about 800 years old. The dry conditions have preserved the wood, but it has become blackened by the intense sunlight. Surrounding the pan on three sides are enormous red sand dunes, said to be among the highest in the world. The contrast of black skeletal trees against the red dunes and white clay creates an iconic subject for photographers: easily ranking with the Grand Canyon and Delicate Arch among the 'top-ten' worldwide landscape photo locations, but with the advantage of being remote and less well known.

Composition. The Deadvlei already has an otherworldly feel about it, and my aim was to create an almost abstract image, sufficiently detached from reality that it had the appearance of a painting or Japanese woodblock print more than a photograph. My main artifice was to use a telephoto lens to compress the perspective and photograph at some distance from the trees so that the dune on the far side of the pan towered over the trees, allowing the sky to be excluded from the frame and thus exclude that reference to reality. Then, there was the matter of choosing which particular trees to include. The highest density of trees is found at the northern end of the pan where the hiking trail enters, but I favored the opposite side of the 'forest' where the trees are more sparse and allow for a simplified composition. In particular, there is a small grouping that includes some wonderfully sinuous trunks. By moving around, sideways, toward and back from this group I was able to find an angle where the trees were attractively arranged, and which gave a good separation without their branches appearing to overlap. A final choice was the height from which to take the shot, which determined the ratio of dune- to- pan in the final image. I took several captures, ranging from holding the camera overhead to lying flat on the ground. Among these I chose the composition you see above, taken from normal standing height, which gives a sense of depth and three-dimensionality to the spacing between the trees. I wanted the dune to provide a colored backdrop, but without detail that might distract from the trees. It is not apparent from the photo, but the dune lies quite a long way behind the trees. Thus, by using a relatively wide aperture (f 5.6) I could slightly blur the dune (and the plants growing on it - the small yellow dots), while keeping all the trees in good focus.

Lighting. The orange/red of the dune is a major part of the image, contrasting with the slightly blue-white of the clay pan. The intense color comes from both the red sand itself, and the warm sunlight shortly after dawn. The sun rose behind a large dune immediately at the back of me, casting a shadow line that descended down the opposite dune. I took the photo just before the shadow reached the clay pan, when the distant dune was evenly illuminated, but the pan remained in shadow. This took some logistical planning, because the entrance gate to the National Park opens only about one half hour before sunrise, and it is 60 km from the gate to Deadvlei, with the last section involving a 4wd drive in low-ratio first gear through deep sand followed bya hike across the dunes. On our first morning I missed the best light having got lost on the walk in, but was able to scout for locations and on the second day was in place with a little time to spare.

Post-processing. The image already looked great straight out of the camera, but I applied a couple of subtle tweaks to provide further enhancement. The first was to deal with the texture of the clay pan, which has a blocky, hexagonal appearance, rather like the Racetrack of Death valley. I felt this was somewhat distracting, and introduced a mundane reality into my intended abstraction. After experimenting with selective Gaussian blurs, I discovered a better treatment by applying a negative 'clarity' setting in Adobe Camera Raw. This gave a mistlike appearance over the pan, but needed careful adjustment to avoid creating obvious halos around the trees. Secondly, reflected light from the dune was warming the pan, whereas I had hoped for a marked color contrast between the dune and shadowed areas illuminated by the blue sky. The final photo is thus a blend of two image files, separately processes in Camera Raw to tweak down the color temperature and add 'negative clarity' in the lower half of the frame.

Full disclosure. I cannot claim my phototo be an entirely original concept. Before leaving for Namibia I had seen this photo of Deadvlei taken by Frans Lanting for National Geographic - indeed, it was a major inspiration for me wanting to visit the location. Although I had not remembered the details of his image, I was interested to find after comparing our photos that we had both chosen the same group of trees. However, we have different interpretations. Frans closely cropped his image so that the outer branches are amputated, whereas I wanted to show the trees in their entirety and emphasize the dune towering above them; and he chose a lower perspective, giving a more two-dimensional appearance. You may also notice that my photo is left-right flipped. I thought this gave a more pleasing 'flow' to the composition; but it is a manipulation that would likely be impermissible for National Geographic!).

Bristlecone pines are the oldest living organisms on the planet, and can be found in abundance at altitudes around 10,000-11,000 ft in the White Mountains of California. Indeed, the White Mountain Bristlecone Pine Forest includes both the largest and the oldest individual living trees. Photographically, however, it is the dead trees that hold most attraction for me. The exposed branches are gnarled and twisted as if expressing the millennia of harsh conditions the trees have endured. Moreover, the wood weathers to a beautiful orange sheen, and it is often the color and texture of the trees that I find myself trying to capture, rather than just the shapes.

This point was brought home a few years ago, when I met up with a husband and wife team photographingt Patriarch Grove, at the very upper altitude limit of the bristlecones. The husband was photographing on medium format black and white film, and was interested only in shapes. He got to sleep late in the mornings, and was out mid-day wandering around at leisure to scout out the best compositions. In contrast, his wife was up well before dawn, scurrying in below freezing temperatures to make best use of the golden light before and just after sunrise.

Sunrise is, in fact, usually better than sunset at Patriarch Grove, because the setting sun is obscured by a high hillside early in the evening before it takes on much color. Given a clear sky to the east, on the other hand, sunrise brings a deep red glow to the trees for just a fleetingly brief few minutes. But, there are still some possibilities in the evening, and on a recent visit I was primarily on the lookout for the quality of light on the bristlecones. with their shapes only a secondary factor. Direct sunlight was uninteresting, but sunlight reflected from the ground onto the shadowed side of the trees created a much warmer glow. This is a standard technique for photographing in narrow slot canyons, where the aim is to avoid direct light at all costs, and frame the picture so the only illumination comes from light reflected and difused from the canyon walls. Not so easy, though, for isolated trees on an open landscape.

To create this month's photo I took advantage of the shaded face of the facing hillside as a background, and gradually worked my way up the opposite slope, staying just above the advancing shadow line while moving from side to side to intersect interesting trees along the way. The bristlecone pictured above had both an interesting and compex form, and was catching beautiful light reflected from the hillside above and behind me. Although dim as compared to direct illumination, by getting very low to the ground I could frame the tree to stand out well in contrast to the deep shade of the opposite hillside and the already fading sunlight on the near foreground. Technically, the only problem was that I was shooting stright into the sun, which was only just above the top of the frame. For once, I remembered to first remove the (flare-inducing) polarizer that usually lives on my lens, and used my hand to shade the lens from the sun. That, together with the remarkably good flare-resistance of the Canon 24-105L lens gave an excellent, contrasty final result.

Two photos for the price of one this month. Both have groups of rock pinnacles as the main subject; both have plants as foreground subjects; and both are examples of extreme near-far compositions. They were captured within a month of each other, but at locations nearly 5000 miles apart. As exam questions during my undergraduate studies in Britain often used to begin "Compare and contrast...".

First, a similarity. Both photographs have interesting landscape features as their main subject. But, a photograph that contains only a single subject is likely to be dull unless that subject is truly exceptional. Something in addition is needed to makean interesting image- for example, spectacular lighting, a complementary foreground/background, or striking composition. At the times I took these shots the lighting was merely meh (as our youngest son would put it), and the skies were either utterly boring (left) or just passable (right). So, I went looking for foreground interest, deliberately seeking small, attractive subjects that would allow an extreme near-far effect. This is something of a contrivance: you don't normally go around looking at things with your head on the ground and eyes a few inches from spiky cacti! But, with care to avoid a totally artificial appearance, the effect can be dramatic. A technical problem then is achieving a sufficient depth of field to encompass the scene. Here I used a tilt/shift lens; specifically the Canon 17 mm TS-E L lens. The foreground plants are just a few inches from the camera. With a conventional lens on a DSLR camera it would not have been possible to maintain sharp focus to the much more distant rocks, but by tilting the lens down relative to the sensor I could obtain a gradient of focal plane from bottom to top of the image to match the progression of the scene into the distance.

The photo on the left is of an iconic group of sandstone pillars in the Devil's Garden, located in Utah's Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monument. I call them the Four Kings; though they may have some other 'official' name. I had photographed the Kings before at sunrise, when they take on a beautiful orange glow, and on a recent trip to hike the Escalante canyons stopped off to scout out other possible compositions. A group of flowering prickly pear cacti stood out as a nice foreground, but as the mid-day light was harsh I resolved to come back after my hikes for a sunrise shot. On returning, I found one error in my planning. The flowers had closed up during the night. But, it still seemed worthwhile to continue. I mounted the camera (5D mkIII) on my tripod, lowered almost to ground level, and used the lcd display to roughly frame the composition. Setting up to use a tilt/shift lens is a fiddly business. Adjustments include the tilt angle, shift, focus and camera angle; all of which interact in non-intuitive ways with one another. Using a magnified live-view image to check focus made it much easier, but I was glad I had allowed plenty of time before the sun was due to rise. The first rays of sunlight then revealed a second error in my planning. My previous visits had been in winter, when the rising sun casts an even light on all four Kings. But now it was late May, the sun was much further to the north, and the leftmost two monarchs were in shadow. Nothing much I could do about that, and even a return visit in January would be to no avail as the cacti would not be in bloom! To make the best of it, I brought up the shadow detail on the rocks in post-processing to reduce the contrast differential. In the end, not quite the photograph I had planned for, but one I am happy with.

The photo on the right is of another iconic group of rocks; the Old Man of Storr and his pointy neighbors on the Isle of Skye. I had got out of bed at 3:00am hoping to photograph the rocks sillhouetted against the sunrise (which comes early that far north), but after much scurrying up and down steep, muddy paths failed to find a good angle. Before heading back to our b&b for a full Scottish breakfast (with local black pudding), I hiked round to the other side of the Old Man to a viewpoint that placed him before the distant Sound and hills of Raasay. A cloudy sky provided a chiaroscuro effect contrasting with fleeting light from the now well-risen sun. But something more was still needed to make a good image, so I scrambled up the steep hillside looking for a suitable foreground. A boulder covered in orange lichen fit the bill, and as a bonus, there was a plant with vivid green leaves and purple flowers just in front. Again, an extreme near-far composition, and I had my tilt/shift lens with me to accomplish this. What I did not have was my tripod; lost, along with all our other luggage, when our flight to the UK was delayed, cancelled, rescheduled and delayed yet again. (Thank you, American Airlines!) So, it had to be a hand-held shot. Not easy, lying on my tummy trying not to roll down a steep slope of wet grass, adjusting the little knobs on the lens while keeping the camera level and the composition composed.Most problematically, there was no way I could use live-view to critically set the focus, so I took my best guess through the viewfinder, and hoped that a small aperture (f18) to maximize depth of field would accommodate any errors. Also, I took many shots, slightly varying focus and position, so I could later select the optimal image.

In conclusion, neither photograph is quite what I had envisaged when setting out for these locations, but you have to go with the flow and accept what you are given. Both images have some failings, and individually I am not sure I would have chosen either as a 'photo of the month'. However, together they make a nice pair, with remarkable similarities yet contrasting two utterly different enviroments of desert and wet moorland.

My New Year resolution to keep up to date with the Photo of the Month has come to naught - already it is the middle of February, and I am only now posting the first photo of 2012. This is not for want of new images to feature, as a trip to Iceland before Christmas was both memorably enjoyable and photographically productive.

Thus, my first selection for the year is from perhaps THE top photographic location in Iceland; Jokulsarlon. The main feature here is a lagoon, into which icebergs calve from a glacier descending from the Vatnajokull ice cap. The bergs drift around in the lagoon, slowly melting until the pass out to sea along a narrow channel. But, they are not done then, as the tides and waves may wash them back up onto the black sand beach. Photographically, the jewel-like bergs contrasted with the jet black volcanic sand make a subject at least as intriguing as the lagoon itself.

Many photographs of the Jokulsarlon beach feature long-exposure images of bergs at the edge of the sea, with receding surf blurred into dream-like patterns. That was not to be on our December visit. Firstly, an account by Varina Patel described her disastrous experience just a month earlier, when a rogue wave brought her down, resulting in a damaged knee and destroyed camera and lens. Secondly, all the bergs had in any case been washed up to the high water mark, and the surf (which appeared innocuous) was breaking far down the beach. Thus, on this visit I had to be content with creating less dynamic images. In consolation, the winter sun rose and set well to the south and out to sea, rather than behind the mountains as in summer. Daylight lasts only a few hours during the depths of the Icelandic winter, but the 'golden hour' stretches throughout this time as the sun barely picks itself up above the horizon. If the clouds cooperate, this can make for spectacular skies. I was lucky on this occasion, when a clearing in the south west allowed the late afternoon (3:00pm!) sun to shine through and catch drifting clouds overhead. To capture the photograph above I selected my widest (10 mm) lens and positioned the tripod low down and close to a grouping of attractive bergs. Even with that lens, I could not encompass enough of the sky, and the final image is a blend of two shots, with exposures set independently for sky and foreground. In both cases I used a 6 stop ND filter to give a 30s shutter speed to blur the surf and the drifting clouds.