I’m pleased to offer my photographs to the public as digital downloads with a print license. Available images are posted in my Galleries, and you can order a downloadable file that is licensed for personal printing.
I captured this image of a large shore cannon while visiting Fort Stevens near Astoria, Oregon while leading my recent Oregon photo safari. This image combines several techniques: HDR merge (Lightroom Classic), Silver Efex Pro 3 (Nik Collection via Adobe Photoshop) and finishing touches back in Lightroom Classic. Because I applied Silver Efex Pro 3 in Photoshop, I was able to retain color in the original image.
On the road from Pitlochry to Inverness, we stumbled upon a glorious rainbow in Cairngorms National Park. I asked our driver to stop the van, and my clients and I captured the fleeting moment of sunshine and color from the roadside.
Tech specs: Nikon Z7 with 24-70mm f/4 S Z-Nikkor
1/200s f/8 ISO 64 (hand-held)
Interested in travel photography? Join one of my 2020 photo tours.
Just for fun I combined one of my brown pelican images from my San Diego birding safari with one of my new Digital Painterly textures. Sometimes you just need to experiment!
Here’s a pretty standard shot of a Western Gull, which I captured a few weeks ago while leading my San Diego Birding photo safari. Gulls are relatively easy targets for practicing your bird shots, and while this shot isn’t remarkable by any means, my choice of gear still made a difference.
First, I was using the Nikon D850 DSLR. The outstanding dynamic range of this camera allowed me to capture the entire gamut of shadows and highlight details in a single exposure. Should I decide to print this image, I could go as large as 24×34 without any resampling.
Second, I used the versatile Nikon 200-500mm f/5.6 VR zoom lens. For a “consumer” lens, it’s really hard to beat. But why this lens was perfect for this shot was because it was not only light enough to hand-hold, but also that it’s minimum focus distance of 7.2′ (2.19m) allowed me to get really close to my subject and create a really smooth out of focus background.
For my last two birding safaris, I’ve eschewed my heavy tripods for the flexibility of a monopod with tilt-head and shoulder-stock. The monopod is lightweight and mobile, but when combined with my Arca-Swiss shoulder stock, I get a very stable configuration in the field, with my legs replacing a tripod. This isn’t easy to do with a monopod alone; the shoulder-stock creates a solid contact point between my camera and my body.
Finally, because processing the final image is just as important to me as the capture itself, I used Adobe Lightroom Classic CC to fine-tune the exposure, tone, and detail in the RAW image. I leveraged Adobe’s Nikon Camera Neutral profile to open the shadows and protect highlights while giving me maximum control over global and local tone and color.
