Long’s Peak and Bear Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park
Fall is a fabulous time of year to visit the national parks. Crowds are usually smaller than in the summer, temperatures are cooler, and some of our national parks have glorious fall colors. With so many to choose from, where should you go? Which national parks will provide the best photographic opportunities in the fall?
Hallett Peak and Flattop Mountain, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
What are the best national parks to photograph in the fall? Here are my choices, grouped by state and province from west to east. This list includes the favorites I have been to, plus the ones I most want to see based on the recommendations of the photographers I trust, like Tim Fitzharris and QT Luong. More about them later.
Headed for Colorado this fall (or any other time of year)? Welcome to my complete Colorado fall color photography and travel guide with 133 photos, 18 maps, and over 100 pages of information (if you print it all out). I cover some of the best known fall color locations in Colorado, and most of these locations look great any other time of year. Spend anywhere from two days to two weeks exploring the beautiful Colorado Rockies at a gorgeous time of year.
Bear Lake, Longs Peak and the Keyboard of the Winds.
Great Horned Owl on the roof of Tess Morgan. iPhone photo from the parking lot.
Yesterday my dog and I were on our daily tour of our local lakes. We got an unusually late start and it was after sunset when we left the first lake. We were in a hurry to get to our second lake when I spotted something out of the corner of my eye on a rooftop corner of Tess Morgan, a college campus building. From a distance it looked like a vent pipe, but a vent pipe should not be located at the corner of the roof. To get a lot closer, I pulled into the parking for a better look. I am so glad I did. It was an owl (photo above).
Anoush, Point Betsie Lighthouse – Overexposed JPEG
On this photo shoot I made a dumb mistake. (It can happen to any of us.) My first few clicks of the shutter were overexposed. When I checked the first few images on the back of the camera I immediately saw the mistake. The overexposed images were shot at f/9, 1/100 second, and ISO 100. They were 1 2/3 stops over Basic Daylight Exposure (BDE). I changed my settings to f/11, 1/200 second, and ISO 100 which is equivalent to BDE. After that my images had good exposures. The first lesson from this mishap is: Don’t get so wrapped up in the energy of a photo shoot that you forget to stop periodically to check your images. To learn more about BDE, see the article linked below.
Adobe Bridge window and Google Earth Pro window. Click the image for a larger version.
It started today when I was using Adobe Bridge to go through some sunset photos I had taken out my car window on a recent trip to Michigan. I wanted to know where I was at when I created these images. (I knew approximately where I was but not exactly.) Finding a photo location is usually a quick and simple procedure. My Canon 7D Mark II records the GPS coordinates of the images I take. I clicked on one of the sunset images in Adobe Bridge. Then I opened Google Earth Pro and placed it on top of the Adobe Bridge window.
Perseid Meteor photographed from Rose Hill Cemetery west of Lamoni, Iowa. 4:55 am CDT, August 13, 2018. Cropped from the original image.
Tonight, August 11-12, is the predicted peak night of the Perseid Meteor Shower this year. But you can also look for the next few nights. This article will tell you what you need to know to see and photograph the most popular meteor shower of the year.
Bear Lake, Longs Peak and the Keyboard of the Winds.
Marshall Pass is a beautiful fall color drive in southern Colorado, and still pretty much a secret. It does not turn up on most lists of the most beautiful fall color drives in Colorado. It is a beautiful drive with a lot of fall color photo opportunities.
Headed for Colorado this fall (or any other time of year)? Welcome to my complete Colorado fall color photography and travel guide with 133 photos, 18 maps, and over 100 pages of information (if you print it all out). I cover some of the best known fall color locations in Colorado, and most of these locations look great any other time of year. Spend anywhere from two days to two weeks exploring the beautiful Colorado Rockies at a gorgeous time of year.
Anoush, Lake Michigan at sunset
It was a beautiful day at a Lake Michigan beach at sunset and the colors just kept getting better as you will see in the next image.
Anoush in flowers, Burgess Corners, Michigan.
I usually do portraits with a DSLR, but every once in a while I do a portrait with my iPhone just to see how it does. In this case, my phone did a pretty good job. We stopped at Burgess Corners Michigan because there is a 1920s era grocery store and gas station on the corner. (I will post gas station photos later.) After taking some photos at the gas station we decided to take advantage of the flowers on the other side of the highway.
Anoush Anou, Manistique River.
This is the latest in the “green towel” series. This towel lives in my car for whenever I am doing water portraits. It is also in my car for the times I need to dry off after I have to wade out into water to get the photo angle I want, or to dry off my tripod legs. There are more green towel photos here.
Anna’s Hummingbird
We were visiting family in the San Francisco Bay Area and I noticed hummingbirds feeding at the Lantana bushes near the back patio. They were fast and unpredictable, feeding at closer blooms but mostly at farther away blooms.
Tiana, Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge
If you are out hiking and a beautiful woman asks you to take her picture, you should probably says yes! We should all be so lucky, right? Well, we didn’t really meet by chance. Tiana is a first class model and photographer living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
A while back I wrote about all of the people that like to go take pictures at the same spot where Ansel Adams created his image “Tetons and the Snake River”. I was curious about other places people like to take picture so I did a Google search for “famous us photo locations”. Google came back with “Most photographed places in the U.S.”
Most of the parade photos taken with the Canon 7D Mark III and a 70-300mm lens. Click the image to see a larger version.
Why do event and assignment photographers take so many images? I am asked that question on a regular basis. For this year’s 4th of July parade I captured 138 images. 135 of them were taken with a pair of DSLR cameras and 3 with my iPhone.
The Strip, Las Vegas with Fireworks
You can point your camera at the sky in auto exposure and autofocus modes and fire away whenever you see a burst of fireworks, but for the best quality photos, it helps to know a few tricks of the trade. It’s easy when you know what to do.
Thorne Swift Photo Collage. Click the collage for a larger version.
Thorne Swift Nature Preserve is one of my favorite photo locations in Michigan and it is well worth visiting from spring through fall. It is just 3 1/2 miles north of Harbor Springs in northern Michigan via M-119, the Tunnel of Trees, and Lower Shore Drive. Directions and maps are at the end of this article. It is one of the field trip options for my nature photography workshops in Northern Michigan.
Google image search. Just a few of the hundreds of results.
Yesterday I wrote: “There are all kinds of photographers who like to plant their tripods where other photographers have taken famous pictures, like hundreds of photographers who have recreated Ansel Adams’ classic image of the Grand Tetons and Snake River.” I was confident that was not an exaggeration. But I decided to look.
The infamous Road to Roscoe. Photo by Dr. John Janovy, Jr. 2015.
It all started October 8, 2022 when John Janovy re-posted a photo of the infamous Road to Roscoe that he had taken in 2015. I was intrigued by the washboard nature of the road. Not only that, in just 4 days on a trip from Iowa to Colorado, I would be just a few miles from where John took this photo. I met Dr. Janovy when I was a student at the University of Nebraska and he was a parasitologist in the biology department. We both share an interest in photography and the natural world, we occasionally send messages to each other, and we are friends on Facebook.
Zion National Park, Utah
Summer is the most popular time to visit the national parks. With so many to choose from, where should you go? Which national parks will provide the best photographic opportunities in the summer?
Pika, Rock Cut, Trail Ridge Road, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
Which national parks are at their photographic best in the summer? Here are my favorite choices, grouped by state from west to east, plus one Canadian province.
Hot weather is here in most of the country so it is time for a “save your camera gear” reminder. High end professional camera gear has a temperature and humidity rating. A top of the line Canon camera body has a limit of 115°F and 85% or less humidity. A black camera on a hot day can easily exceed that limit. Less expensive cameras of any brand have lower limits so it is important to protect your gear.
McGulpin Rock and the Mackinac Bridge, October 4, 2006.
I stumbled (not literally) across McGulpin Rock in 2006 quite by accident. I was wandering the Lake Michigan shoreline and there it was. I did not know at the time that it is historically famous. Five years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, French explorers found McGulpin Rock in 1615.
Before and After Setting A Custom White Balance
Setting a custom white balance is the key to better, more accurate colors. I took the photo on the left before setting a custom white balance. The lights in the room give everything a slight yellow-green color cast. Your eye-brain compensates for the color cast but your camera does not. I set a custom white balance on my camera and then took the picture on the right. The colors are now accurate and the photo looks much better as a result.
Robert Capa: Normandy. June 6th, 1944.
June 6, 1944 was the allied invasion of Normandy, the largest seaborne invasion in history. 24,000 allied troops parachuted into France shorty after midnight. The next morning beginning at 6:30 am over 150,000 American, British, and Canadian troops landed. There were 10,000 casualties and 4,414 confirmed dead.
Soleece, before and after Adobe Camera Raw.
Cameras, no matter how expensive, do not capture “visual reality”. In other words, what you see with your eyes is not what the camera captures when you click the shutter. The photo on the right is what my eyes saw when I clicked the shutter. The photo on the left is what my camera gave me. I used Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) to turn the camera image on the left into the image on the right. Plus I cropped the final image. The process of turning the camera image into the image you want only takes a minute or two.