Tomorrow we are flying down to Arizona for the annual trip to visit the parents at their snowbird home. My hope is that Marly and I will get several chances to get out and shoot the desert landscape and wildlife. Last year, my mother and I went to Sonoran Desert National Monument one evening and I posted about it a while back. I thought I would share a few more images from that day in anticipation of this year's trip.
If you've never seen a flock of hundreds of thousands of large birds, it should be on your "bucket list." The first time I witnessed this spectacle was during my 2010 North Carolina photography workshop. On New Year's Eve 2011, I had the "snow goose experience" again.
My parents now have a winter home in the Phoenix area, so last January we stayed with them for a week or so and loved it. The pleasant temperatures, sunshine, and lack of wind made it easy to understand the annual migration of the "snowbirds."
Marly and I just got back from a quick trip to the Bradenton, Florida area. We joined friends for a lot of tennis and good company, but of course I was also hoping to do some photography. We didn't get to do much in the way of pictures, but I did manage to snap a few shots on some early morning walks in the neighborhood.
The morning after my South Carolina Photography Workshop, I hopped in the rental car at 6:00 am and drove back to Hunting Island Beach to do some more shooting on my own. I found an interesting grouping of stumps, attached my polarizing filter, and set my tripod into the wet sand.
My workshop experience in South Carolina last February began with a beach shoot at sunrise. We arrived at the beach just as twilight was beginning to reveal a surreal landscape. This particular stretch of beach is strewn with the skeletons of large trees, killed and blackened by the encroaching ocean.
Sometimes in nature photography you are pleasantly surprised. After a beautiful sunrise, our morning in Theodore Roosevelt National Park looked bleak, light-wise. Clouds obscured the sun's golden morning light and I thought landscape photography was going to be a bust. Instead I ended up getting one of my favorite shots of the trip.
In a previous post, I mentioned creating a high-dynamic-range image using multiple exposures. In this post I want to show an example of one of my favorite digital photography techniques: Creating an HDR image from just one RAW capture.
I was excited to do some landscape and macro photography on our recent trip to Theodore Roosevelt National Park, but our numerous encounters with wildlife were an unexpected bonus.