Category Archives: Featured Images

My Favorite Photos From This Past Winter

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With longer days and a heavy dose of sunshine and beautiful warm weather that’s descended upon Anchorage lately, I’m struggling with the motivation to sit at my desk and do much work these days. Mostly I just want to be outside riding my bike. So, that’s what I’ve been doing on most days.

When I am inside, I try to stay on top of email and keep filming videos for my YouTube channel and lessons for my Photography On The Brain course, which has just begun its second hear. However, I find myself mostly wanting to do things that nurture myself and take my mind off of the continuing pandemic; like bake bread and engage in activities that qualify as goofing off.

So, in lieu of a regular “photography tips” post, I figure I’d take a quick look back at some of my favorite photos from this past winter.

Although I do love summer, winter up here in Alaska has a certain undeniable magic that makes for wonderful photography opportunities. For as much effort as it often requires, I find winter photography to be immensely rewarding. Between the bold colors of the low sun and the otherworldly textures that a heavy blanket of snow often provides, winter scenes hold such a unique fascination for me.

Winter is when I shoot most of my aerials, and during this past season, I even tried something new: I made my first aerial movie, a short film called AERIAL ADVENTURE – Winter Flying in Alaska.

Of course, there’s another aspect about winter that’s making me feel especially nostalgic. The winter of 2019-20 was the last time on earth when there was no such thing as the COVID pandemic. It was the last time we carried ourselves through daily life as we always did before the novel coronavirus spread across the entire planet and messed everything up for everyone.

So, without trying to elaborate on that further or try to come up with some kind of profound photography lesson for the day, I’ll just show you some pretty pictures. Here are a few of my favorite photos from the past winter.

Enjoy, be safe and take care, everyone!

Isolating Your Subjects with a Short Telephoto Lens

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I’ve always been a fan of the fixed short telephoto lens, which is typically a mid-range focal length with a relatively compact size. In use, this type performs like a classic normal lens, but with a little more throw, and it has the basic characteristics of long telephoto without the encumbering bulk and weight of a bigger zoom.

In practical terms, a short telephoto allows you to isolate subject matter that’s relatively close to the camera and add slight compression to your scene. The effect is an image that’s clean from the distracting elements that a wider lens would catch and enough bokeh to allow the main subject to stand out from the background.

For this reason, I find the short telephoto to be an excellent choice for shooting intimate landscapes that feature a prominent subject with just one or two other elements that help give a sense of environment to the shot.

Traditionally, the short telephoto has been considered the ideal lens for shooting portraits, and while I do use mine for that, I love using it to shoot nature scenes. For this reason, it would also be an excellent choice for things like street photography and travel, because it allows you to capture the details of the world in and make clean, simple compositions.

In my mind, the short telephoto focal length checks two boxes that can always lead towards more effective compositions: simplifying the scene and making use of varying depths of focus. Both of these techniques help you create pictures that easily draw your viewers into the shot and leave no ambiguity about what they should be looking at.

In other words, it allows them to clearly answer the question, “What’s the picture about?”

My favorite short telephoto lens these days is the Fujifilm XF50mm f/2. It’s a pocket sized, weather sealed gem that only weighs 7 oz. It’s small and light enough to carry with you all the time, it has a minimum focusing distance of just 1.28 feet (39 cm), and it has a fast f/2 aperture. (Read my full review of this lens here.)

With a focal length that equates to about 76mm compared to old film lenses, it offers just enough compression at close to medium distances to make it an extremely versatile lens for a wide range of styles and subject matter. For this reason, that little 50 has become one of my favorite Fuji lenses and it goes with me just about everywhere.

Back when I shot Nikon, my favorite short telephoto was the venerable 105mm f/2.5 manual focus. Nikon’s current AF equivalent is the 105mm f/2.8G lens. Canon also has a 100mm f/2.8 lens. Either of those would be a great short telephoto.

In addition, many kit lenses and shorter zooms encompass this focal length, so even you don’t have a fixed telephoto prime, you can still make use of these techniques.

I shot all of these photos this week, thanks within a mile of my house, either in my neighborhood, or along the main bike path that runs right through Anchorage. In addition to the main subjects I captured, all of these scenes where filled with regular city stuff, like houses, power lines, traffic lights, street lamps, etc…

With the really bright orangey sunset photos, I shot all of those on the trail right next to one of the larger intersections in the city. The background was filled with all kinds of stuff I didn’t want in my shot, and by using the short telephoto and a bit of walking to find good vantage points, I was able to crop all those distracting elements out right inside the viewfinder and make clean, uncluttered compositions.

In my mind, the short telephoto is a lens that fits in with that notion of abbreviation, which I consider to be such a vital compositional concept in photography. By abbreviating your scenes, instead of showing everything, you create much clearer compositions, and you engage your viewers to imagine what lies outside the borders of your frame.

If you have a short telephoto, whether it’s a prime, or if you have that focal length on one of your zoom lenses, I encourage you to spend more time experimenting with it.

The key is getting close to your subjects so that you isolate specific parts of your scene, while eliminating everything else. You can leave one or two elements things in the shot, but they must be things that either accentuate, compliment or contrast in some intriguing way with your main subject.

Have fun.

Early January is The Most Magical Time of the Year in Alaska

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Some people think the big payoff for living in Alaska is the 24-hour daylight we get in the summertime. They would be wrong.

I won’t say that those super long days aren’t nice. After all, I love summer when I can ride my mountain bike in shorts for hours at a time, hike until midnight and explore gravel bars in my little yellow Cessna without having to preheat the engine and shovel out the plane from two feet of snow.

But ask true Alaskans who love the outdoors, and most of them will tell you that there’s something truly magical about those first couple weeks of winter. During early January, when the sun is low on the horizon and the temperatures are well below zero for days on end, the light is simply magical.

Looking down my street at sunset.

When the air is clear and cold for days at a time, hoar frost forms on every surface, and it turns the trees in to shape the resemble something out of a Dr. Suess book.

And when you add in the brilliant gold and pink light from the low sun, which barely skims the horizon for just a few short hours, the result is truly spectacular scenery that only happens for a few days out of the year.

This is what we live for. At least those of us who pay attention to the light.

After weathering the increasingly dark and cold days of late fall, the ice-laden days we often get in November, and the hit or miss days of December, when we usually see multiple freeze/thaw cycles, Chinook windstorms and numerous false starts to winter, January finally brings the payoff.

Sure, it might be 20 below out on the trails, but the light is so pretty, it makes it all worth the effort. Plus, there’s something really cool about bundling up and braving these bitter cold conditions on foot our on our fat tire bikes.

The trees across the street from my house.

There’s something quite unique about riding or walking on snow when it’s this cold. It’s very loud. It squeak and creaks, and with the noise dampening effect of the snow-laden forest, other sounds become oddly amplified, like the rustling of your jacket, or the swinging straps on your backpack.

It’s loud enough that it sometimes makes you turn around to see who’s there, but you realize that’s no one. It’s just you, all alone in this special and otherwise quiet wilderness.

Hoar frost on the trees, shot from my front porch with a long lens.

When you stop moving, everything is silent, but you know that the forest around you is alive. You can look up at the snow-covered pine trees, and even though they’re standing there completely motionless, you know that they see you, or at least know you’re there. Maybe they’re even talking to each other. I often wonder what they’re saying. Maybe this is their favorite time of the year too.

All of the photos in this post were shot within 50 feet from my front door, all in the first week of January in the last two years. Three of the five were shot yesterday afternoon, at around 3:30pm, right at the peak of sunset. This shot immediately above was shot will standing on my front porch. All were made with my Fuji 100-400 lens, which is really fun for isolating specific parts of the landscape.

They’re all proof that we truly live in Magic Land, and that you don’t need to go very far to take compelling photographs. And they’re proof that this first part of January, as cold as it may be, is indeed the most wonderful and special time of the year in Alaska.

Ask anyone.

What is Your Photography Happy Place?

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What is your “Photography Happy Place?” Do you have a location you like to visit often, that always seems to inspire your creativity and your desire for taking pictures? A place that often looks different, depending on the season, the … Continue reading →

It’s No Coincidence that Fall & Fuji Begin With The Same Letter

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Ah… Autumn, or as we usually just call it, Fall. That splendid time of year, when the entire hemisphere changes color, suddenly shifting from the serene and timeless shades of green and blue, to the visually overloading hues of red, … Continue reading →

Comparing Last Year’s Favorite Photo With This Year’s Version

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As a spastic, high energy cyclist and action photographer, I practically live for cyclocross season. I find it to be an incredibly fun way to spend a few hours on a Saturday morning in the fall, as I cheer on … Continue reading →

My 5 Favorite Cyclocross Photos from This Past Weekend

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The cyclocross season continues, with our second Anchorage race of the series taking place this past Saturday, which, of course, meant another great opportunity for some action photography. As always, I spent a good two hours running around with my … Continue reading →