Mendenhall Glacier Juneau, Alaska Willie, Andy, and I visited Juneau, Alaska for a chance to explore some of the ice caves at Mendenhall Glacier. You start out by walking through a temperate rain-forest (who knew there'd be a rainforest next to a glacier?!) and then eventually make your way down to glacier. The large ice-cave that we were hoping to explore had melted and instead of photographing ice-caves we had to find something else to photograph. On our final day in Juneau, Willie and I decided to hike back to Mendenhall Glacier and try our hand at some abstract photos of the jagged shapes of the flowing hunk of ice. We climbed to the top of a hill and looked down onto the glacier for a magnificent view. Using a telephoto lens I snapped over 370 photos of the glacier and combined them into a 932 megapixel image. Once stitched I could choose any part of the glacier to re-crop into an abstract view. In this 21 megapixel crop I loved the way the lines of the glacier draw into the jagged peaks in the middle, only to flatten out again at the top. Nikon D800 w/Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8: 125mm, f/11, 1/100 sec, ISO 100
Venus and Night Sky over Mud Cracks Death Valley National Park, California There’s a couple scenes that Death Valley is known for: beautiful salt flats, rolling Sand Dunes, and plays filled with mud-cracks. On this particular trip in November 2016, Willie and I managed to photograph all 3 of these, and perhaps a little bit more. On this particular evening we hiked out to a playa filled with mud-cracks and ran around like giddy school-boys as we found amazing pattern after amazing pattern. We left clothing in various locations to mark our favorite spots and then watched as clouds rolled in just at sunset to give us an amazing sunset. I had to force myself to stop and let it soak in, before frantically getting back to my camera to try to take as many photos as I could, with a number of different compositions. After the sun went down we decided to wait for blue hour to kick in so we could take some star photos with the playa. As we waited I noticed that the color in the sky never really faded ... it just kept lingering. So of course I kept taking photos! Saturn even popped into view, as you can see the bright spot in the middle of the sky. I named this photo “Our Playa” because the shape of the mud cracks, at the bottom, forms both an “A” for Aaron and a “W” for Willie. Special thanks to David Thompson for giving us some amazing tips! Nikon D800 w/Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8: 15mm, f/4.5, 10 sec, ISO 2000
Sunset over Sunflowers Vacaville, California I’ve always been in love with sunflowers. One of my earliest memories is from pre-school where I would make the teachers pick me up so I could grab the seeds from the few sunflowers that grew near the playground. During high school we would eat sunflowers while I sat waiting as designated pinch runner on the baseball team. When I drove by the sunflower fields near Sacramento a few years ago I knew one day I’d have to get some photos of them! Unfortunately last summer was a cloudless summer and there really weren’t any opportunities to photograph the sunflower fields. This year, despite the drought, has had a number of beautiful summer monsoonal sunsets. The weather forecast looked juicy and Cmdr Acosta even came out of hibernation to join Willie, Alan, Ropelato and I at the sunflower fields. Virga filled the sky as we drove and we prayed that the horizon wouldn’t be so thick that it blocked sunset light. Once at the fields we ran around like chickens with our heads cut off trying to find the best patch of sunflowers. They were slightly past their prime with shriveled up leaves and droopy heads but that didn’t stop us. When the sky lit up beautifully we were ready to capture it. Running from composition to composition can sometimes get a bit hectic and in my rush I forgot to “focus stack”: focus on multiple areas both near and far to ensure the entire scene is in focus. Some of you may prefer this photo to be sharp front-to-back but I actually preferred the blurred background ... it locks the eye on the 2 sunflowers in the front. What do you prefer? Deep depth of field or the shallow one? Nikon D800 w/Rokinon 14mm f/2.8: 14mm, f/5.6, 1/100 sec, ISO 640
