Bryce, Zion, Monument Valley, Arches, Grand Canyon, are just a few of the magnificent “red” locales we love to visit for landscape photography. You wanna do them right, you gotta add white and when I say white, I mean snow! Snow makes the reds of the earth just light on fire! It’s so easy to say but oh, so difficult to do. Proof? Look at how old this photo is and I try every year to mate the two, red and white. And with the current wx ups and downs, it’s even more difficult. I have a WHOLE lot of photos of these locales taken in January, Feb & March but only 3 times have I hit the snow. Part of the issues is planning in advance, part of the problem is it is the desert so they are supposed to be dry and lastly is these locales tend to shut down with snow. I tried to make it happen again this year so fingers crossed. If I went today, there’s no snow, next week looks better and my dates in March, I dunno. All I know for sure is, red loves white!

It wasn’t my first time at Cape Disappointment but I’ve been afraid to go back ever since. It’s not fear of the giant, couple hundred foot waves, I can never get tired of that power. No, it’s because now I shot with the Z 9. I took thousands of images last time with the Z 6II, I can’t imagine what I would do with 20fps but it would be epic. The most amazing aspect to this mighty display is you can come back a couple of hours later and there isn’t a wave big enough to push a beach ball into shore.

You need a couple of factors to produce the massive waves at Cape Disappointment. High tide is one part, a large winter storm is the other. The combo produce a show that lines the breakwater with photographers and adventures shoulder to shoulder. It is an aspect of winter that coastal inhabitants are all too well aware of. It’s another amazing example of Mother Nature and the power of a winter storm.

Yep, it’s back! El Niño is back and this year’s shift is defined as — “the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (“ENSO”) climate pattern—is currently chugging along, and forecasters expect it to continue for the next several months, with a 62% chance of lasting through April–June 2024. It’s looking like it will be a strong event.” For us photographers this means the white stuff will be thin and might disappear quickly especially off trees which is where the photographs often lie. If you’re like me and you love photographing in these conditions, we need to plan so we can dash off to chase the snow when it arrives. It looks like we might have hours after a storm to get to the white stuff and photograph it sticking to trees. There is fun in a challenge you you want snow, plan well!