Another favorite is the Yellow Rose (shown in the gallery above). That was one of the first shots taken when I first got a digital camera and started taking photography seriously. It was also the first time I intentionally used Photoshop to alter the mood of an image. That's an old image and people always say they like it.

Favorite Location: I could move to the Sierra Nevada Mountains and photograph Yosemite National Park for the rest of my life. But I can't now. Right now my local favorites are Watkins Glen and Letchworth State Park.

Favorite Photographers: Jim Zuckerman, Galen Rowell, Christopher Hauth

Comments on Photography:
Ansell and Black and White
I have trouble admiring Ansell Adams as the awesome photographer most people do. Although his work is great, I feel he often benefited from being a pioneer photographing locations such as Yosemite Valley. It's tough to take a horrible photograph of such beautiful scenery. He mastered black-and-white photography but greatly struggled with color. In fact his color photographs are average at best. I have seen many current photographers eclipse his past photos with new digital techniques and superb color imagery.  He did, developed a lot of techniques are fundamentals of the photographic process. That I respect and admire him for. In fact, I don't really see his photos being aesthetically beautiful as much as they are technically beautiful.

On the topic of black-and-white photography, I have a highly controversial take. I don't like it. Well... I don't like how it's being used recently. A lot of people nowadays will take a sub par photograph, desaturated so it's grayscale, and call it a work of art. A lot of people nowadays see black-and-white imagery and think "art." Black-and-white tones are now used as a cliché to show that it image is on a higher artistic level than it actually is. All too often do I see people on Flickr take a mediocre color shot converted to grayscale and all of a sudden people to start gawking over how great and artistic it looks. It's not like the photographer originally composed for black-and-white. No, they took it with their digital camera. It look like shit when they copied over to the computer, so the took all the color out of it and all of a sudden it looks like they're an art student working these photos out of a lab at the local college. It doesn't surprise me that most people, when creating black-and-white photography, desaturate color images. They don't even know how to do it right. They know nothing about color blocking filters or channel mixing technique pros use to create a tonally balanced black-and-white image.  Take some time and learn how to do it right and you'll get fantastic results.

You see directors now filming movies and black-and-white to set the tone of the film or two emphasized the time period which the film takes place. Despite what directors may think, people didn't see the world in black-and-white back then. They were able to see color with their eyes, just like we can today. The only reason why we associate black-and-white with those periods of time is because at that time they lack the technology to create proper color images, so our records of the time are in black-and-white. The whole world was not a black-and-white in 1945. I guess if you're trying to re-create the look of a film made or picture taken in that era, you can justify it, but not if you're trying to accurately re-create that era. Otherwise why not have an artist paint all he scenes for any movie made about the renaissance. It’s a director’s trick into making their film looks artsy.

In the age of film, photographers would use black-and-white photography because that's all they could afford to do in their own labs. In the early 1900s black-and-white photography was limitation of the photographic medium and was the only method cost feasible early in the history of photography.

With black-and-white white photography all you have to do is tame and capture tone. With color photography not only do you have to consider tone, but the mood and color accuracy. It's a dimension totally beyond black-and-white photography, and in my opinion it's a step above and requires far more skill. That's not say there aren't great black-and-white photographs being taken right now. New inks and dies and new metallic tinted paper, allow for some fine looking black-and-white images in today's age. And a lot of people still shoot specifically for black-and-white output. But they don't just desaturate their color images. They spent a lot of effort composing, exposing, filtering and fighting for good black-and-white results. Black-and-white photography is a great way to practice getting the tone of images correct. Once you learn that, start working with color.

Even a color photographer must learn how to master the tone of black and white images. With Photoshop one must think Black and White and then use color techniques to achieve Ansel Adam's-like results from their color photos.

Compacts and SLRs

I recently began shooting with an SLR. A lot of  pros, or people that think they are pros shun anyone that doesn't use and SLR. I can say although an SLR is nice, other than the lens-swapping capability, it's a step backward for myself, who has grown accustomed to a compact enclosed system.

With non-SLR, compact cameras there are no interchangeable lenses or prism optics. These are the cameras people use primarily to point and shoot. Although my secondary camera actually offers a lot of pro level features, it is still considered for and marketed towards the amateur crowd. But I wouldn't shrug it off as somethign a pro wouldn't use. The compact cameras not only offer the versatility of being compact, nearly half the size of the similar-featured SLR, but the superior wide-angle capacities, completely enclosed system, and lack of prism shutter are ideal for the type of work I do. Hiking and climbing upstream with dirt and sand everywhere, it's great to carry along a compact, enclosed system that I can rely on.

When shooting waterfalls or any other scenery with long shutter speeds, having a camera that doesn't flip a mirror on the exposure keeps my photos sharp. Having a positional live preview, also allows me to shoot from various angles I wouldn't be able to shoot from with a digital SLR. Luckily today's digital SLR's are becoming more like advanced compact cameras. They usually come with a standard lens. New features, such as the live preview offered in new Olympus models, bring them only closer to compact cameras.