I made this photo at Imperial Beach Pier which is only a few miles north of the border with Mexico. I didn’t do a lot of planning on this day but I felt like photographing at the coast and making a seascape. Usually I check the directions of the clouds and the tide levels before deciding exactly where to shoot sunset – in this case I realized that conditions would be good here and I left early and managed to arrive about 50 minutes before sunset ..read more

This summer I made a few trips out to the California desert to photograph some abandoned trains and railway tracks. There are lots of these spots maybe just an hour east of San Diego. Most of my shooting was done with the Milky Way as a prime subject of the composition. But on the last trip out, I decided to ignore the core completely and point my camera in the other direction ..read more

I thought I’d start a “making of” series where I cover the creative and technical choices behind a photo that I’ve been working on. This is intended to give an overview of the important decisions in a short and easily digestible manner. Close-up of sand verbena in the Anza Borrego desert. This first photo is from two weeks ago when I went out to Anza Borrego State Park. With all the rain in SoCal, we’ve had very good blooms but it’s not quite at the level of a superbloom ..read more

As someone who prints a lot, I often get asked if it’s worth buying a possibly very expensive printer and printing your work at home. There isn’t a simple answer but in short I would say that if you enjoy the printing process, then by all means go ahead and get one. It can be fun, artistically rewarding, convenient, and may be cheaper than using a lab. The flips side is that you can also waste a ton of money, tear your hair out in frustration, and wish you never bought the damn thing ..read more

One of the curses of shooting with Sony cameras is their RAW file format. Currently they only offer two methods for saving RAW files: (1) a RAW file with lossy compression, and (2) an uncompressed RAW file. Did you notice what’s missing? Sony doesn’t offer a lossless compressed RAW file unlike every other camera manufacturer. This makes me incredibly mad ..read more

Yesterday was the artists reception where all the photographers who made it to Tier 2 were invited to the exhibit and the awards were publically announced. But before I get into my results, I wanted to make a a few comments about the competition and judging process ..read more

So you got your notification from the fair and have advanced to Tier 2 where you need to submit physical prints. Now what? You first need to decide three things before proceeding ..read more

Although I am a photographer, I think it’s important to study the work of other visual artists especially those in different mediums. Painters, illustrators, graphic designers, collage, and other 2d artists often approach their work with a different mindset and I feel there is much that photographers can learn from them. In a painting, nothing is accidental and everything was the result of a conscious decision. Thus if you see a particular color treatment or composition you know that was because the painter deliberately decided to make it so ..read more

If you’ve ever had a hard time finding a photo that you took before, couldn’t find the original raw file for a jpeg that you have, or found multiple copies of an image but couldn’t tell which was the final version then read on. I help a lot of people with editing their photos and invariably one area that people need assistance is organizing their photo files. Often their photos will be in mish mash of folders, spread across multiple disks, with random unintelligible file names ..read more

During the past year, I’ve been sharing many of my astro-landscapes and one thing that people have repeatedly asked me is how do I get my foregrounds so detailed and clean. Usually the problem photographers have when shooting the night sky is that their foregrounds are too dark, too noisy, or both ..read more