After a bit of thought, I have compiled my top 40 picks from the last 12 months. I selected from a variety of outings and types of photography, ranging from landscape, to wildlife, to pet photography. Unfortunately, 2014 was not the year I caught up on my backlog of photos waiting to be processed, so this list was not selected from all of my 2014 photographs (you’ll have to wait till next year’s round-up for those!)
This year included a fantastic fall color photo trip to the San Juan mountains in Colorado, as well as visits to the Sierra Nevada and of course many bird photographs, including some previously unpublished.
Please enjoy the gallery below. For best viewing (especially if viewing on a mobile device), please click on the following photo:
Gem lies on the floor, fast asleep
Or, just enjoy the gallery here on the page. To view larger photos in the embedded gallery below, click here to enter full screen mode.
If you are interested in compilations from previous years, please see the 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 lists.
One goal of nature photography is to take the chaos of a wild landscape, and using nothing but the perspective of the rectangle of your camera’s view, to simplify and distill the scene into a singular message. One of the most chaotic environments in which I shoot regularly is a forest. Once you combine tree trunks, branches, leaves, and vegetation, you are often presented with quite a mess of a scene. Finding patterns and removing the extraneous elements can be a huge challenge.
One technique I use to help the viewer see the intended patterns I am trying to convey is to use and pay careful attention to the separation of the main elements of my photo. Here are several forest scenes that I shot on a recent trip to the San Juan mountains in Colorado. With each, I spent a great deal of time in the field moving the camera and field of view to just the right location, to make sure the trees were not merging with each other in ways that detracted from my vision.
Bone white aspen trunks create abstract lines over distant fall foliage, Ridgway Colorado
When I took this photo, I was in a location with a dirt road running along one side of a narrow valley. The opposite side of the valley was covered with a kaleidoscope of fall colors – a beautiful display. Above the road on my side of the valley was a stand of aspen, with perfect bone-white trunks. I knew the shot I was looking for – now it was a matter of hoping I could find the right composition.
I moved up the steep slope and into the aspen grove. Using a medium to long lens and moving up-slope above the trees, I could shoot straight through a select group of trunks, using the beautiful colors from the other side of the valley as my backdrop. Now was the truly challenging part – I needed to find just the right group of trees that showed a consistent pattern of separation from one another. I finally found some good candidates and spent a while getting my tripod into the right location. Working on such a steep muddy slope made the work slow and arduous. I slipped more than once, preferring to let my clothes take the brunt of the mud rather than my expensive gear.
In the photo, you’ll notice that the spacing between the left and right edges and the left and right most trees is the same. I tried to keep similar spacing between each tree, so as to repeat this pattern across the frame. The trouble trees are the three right most; but after working with them a while, I began to really like how they broke the perfectly even pattern. It brings just a touch of wildness into the photo, hinting at the chaos of this forest.
Thick fog shrouds a forest of aspen, Ridgway, Colorado
Another great natural phenomenon to take advantage of to help simplify a scene is fog. This can work especially well to simplify a forest scene, and it worked very well with aspen. Again, I worked on creating an even spacing across the closest trees, knowing they would be rendered in the photo with the most contrast. With these photos, it is especially important to pay very careful attention to the edges of the frame.
Fallen aspen leaves carpet the forest floor casting the trunks in a golden white
This last photo was perhaps the most difficult of the three. I saw the foreground cluster of trees, and as I moved closer, I saw a repeating cluster in the background, a perfectly placed V shape in the similarly shaped void between the right most tree and the trees to the left of the frame. However, seeing it and shooting it were different beasts. Instead of using my perspective to flatten a three dimensional scene across the frame as in the previous two photos, here I was using the shapes to accentuate the depth of this pattern.
Once I got the tripod and camera in place to get the background cluster of trees where I wanted them, I spent time working on smaller separations appearing in the left most cluster. Some of the trees I could stack on top of each other and hide from the camera’s view-port, but there was one distant tree that kept creating problems. Finally, I got into a position which put the distant tree into a spot that prevented it from peaking out from behind the foreground trees, and I knew I had it.
Although I was working with depth in this photo, the goals were the same as the previous photos: to simplify the chaos of nature into a digestible, understandable subject. Paying special attention to control the spacing between primary elements in the photograph can help achieve this goal.
Like many of the most visited national parks, Arches in Moab, Utah offers the visitor many spectacular natural wonders. But for the photographer, these more popular parks can be a real challenge – how do you find originality in a place that has been covered with a camera so thoroughly? I found this especially true when I visited Arches this past September. It was true that everywhere I turned I saw famous arches, but that was just the problem – they were all famous. Sure, I still set about capturing them for myself, but looking back, are any of these photos of which I’m really proud? How does this differentiate my portfolio from any of the thousands of talented photographers that visit every year?
Another challenge of this park is that in many areas, visitors are restricted to established trails. While I can certainly appreciate the reasons (the main one being the fragile biological soil crust supporting life throughout the desert), it is not my idea of freedom of exploration with a camera!
I thought about these challenges as I explored the park in 90+ degree heat. The last time I was here there was a fresh blanket of snow on the ground, so the dry desert look was bumming me out a little. I had already taken a midday hike out to Delicate Arch (purposefully leaving all my heavy camera gear back at the car), and I was getting impatient for sunset, even though I had not yet scouted an acceptable location. Finally, I saw something of interest just off trail, and it wasn’t surrounded by twenty photographers! An old twisted log created some interested shapes, and had the bonus of wildflowers growing at its base. And you know what? Not a single arch in sight! Oh well, just because I’m in a place famous for arches doesn’t mean all my shot HAVE to include arches.
I set about creating a composition that I liked. This process is usually a mixture of pre-visualization and experimentation. I knew I wanted to get in relatively close to the flowers and the log, and I wanted something fairly wide to include the cliff beyond. Probably no wider than 24mm, so I attached my 24-70 and got my tripod legs low and splayed out. Slowly I worked the camera and tripod in and out of the scene, watching the edges of my composition, and adjusting the tripod legs as necessary. When working in this way in a busy location, don’t worry about others stopping behind you to watch what you’re doing, and sometimes wondering what it is you are taking a picture of (rest assured, this WILL happen).
After about 10 minutes, I had my shot in the bag and was ready to move on. While certainly not a portfolio quality shot, I was happy to have found something that allowed me to express my creativity, and come away with something that wasn’t also on hundreds of other photographers’ memory cards that day.
A little while ago I visited Arastradero Preserve in Palo Alto, CA in order to get some photos of some of the white-tail kites that live there. And I was certainly not disappointed. I climbed a large hill in order to get above some of the trees on which they perch while they are not hunting. I quickly saw one of the kites and slowly made my way toward its tree.
A white-tailed kite perches on a tree branch, surveying the landscape around it
With my eye glued to the view finder, I had my lens tight in on this bird, capturing shots of it flying up and back to various branches on the tree. Suddenly a dark form darted by just above the kite. Luckily, my photography training was to shoot first and ask questions later, and I capture a single frame of what I later saw to be another kite flying at the first one.
A male white-tail kite flies past a female, which reacts to his close proximity
The male quickly mated with the female, and just as quickly flew away. And before you ask, yes I do have photos, but hey, this is a family friendly blog!
A male white-tail kite approaches a female from behind and mates with it
I’ve never seen this before or since, and I definitely know that I wouldn’t have been able to capture these shots if I hadn’t already had the female framed and in focus. Sometimes you just get lucky….
