The beauty experience from Tunnel View, Yosemite Nat’l Park is a show stopper! I’m used to sharing it with hundreds of folks celebrating their wild heritage. This morning, there was just a handful, and I gotta tell ya, the piece and quite added to the coming sunrise. When the glow of the coming sun started to light up The Valley, I started to click. Past experience has taught me that once the sun peaks over Half Dome, it blasts right into the lens, it’s kinda nasty. Of course, once the sun pops over, the gathered crowd goes ballistic, selfies and shutter clicks echo the platform. Then they look at their photos, and you hear they say, “the time we should have taken the photo was just a millisecond before the moment!”

It had rained, rained really hard, all night long. As dawn rounded the corner, the warmth of the equator turned that fallen rain to fog that slowly flowed up to be trapped by the canopy of the forest. In that canopy is a vast ecosystem of mammals, birds, insects, and reptiles, it is simply spectacular the life found under its cover. You might have noticed I used a 600mm lens to make the shot and wondered why. The answer is sad, it’s because the forest all around this patch is gone, taken to the ground for as far as the eye can see. It’s a world deserving of your time, passion, it is cloaked in mystery, full of life.

Mt. Hood is a very gorgeous, picturesque mountain for sure. The Command-Aire, OX-3 & Eaglerock are spectacular aircraft. The early morning light is sunning. Making the click happen was pretty self-explanatory but when you search my files for “aviation landscapes,” you’ll find just a few. That’s because they are really hard to find and harder to capture. Why?

Your basic landscape photo needs certain elements to be successful. For example, for starters, a foreground, middle ground, and background. Most airports, the background is either flat with no content (great for statics) or busy with buildings (bad for landscapes). Your subject is often in the middle ground. One aircraft typically doesn’t cut it, you need multiple. Stacking up aircraft requires a longer lens, 200mm or more. When you add up all those basic requirements, one can understand the challenge. I’m always on the lookout for them, but my mind wonders, landscape or plane click?