I recently returned from a trip to Alaska, where my main goal was to photograph the Alaskan brown bears during the annual salmon run in Katmai National Park. First, to get this out of the way, grizzly bears are a sub-species of brown bears. The bears in Katmai are considered brown bears and not grizzlies. Per the park’s website the difference is somewhat arbitrary, but grizzlies don’t have access to coastal food sources (like salmon) and tend to be smaller.
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This is the second of my series of posts covering images taken within a single 24-hour period. In addition to the photos, I will include some of the travel, planning, and technical aspects of these trips. The first entry in the series covered a day around Banff, Canada on a winter day.
Today’s entry covers the morning of February 2, 2019 through sunrise the next morning. Trust me though, I am strictly adhering to my 24 hour rule for these posts. I made plans to visit the area along the Utah/Arizona border in early February with a friend. Our primary goals were to visit “The Wave” in the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument as well as Horseshoe Bend near Page, Arizona.
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Sandee and I did an 8 day tour in Israel at the beginning of December. We don’t normally do tours as we generally prefer the freedom to explore at our own pace – sometimes even taking days to just relax. In this case we knew we’d have a much better experience having a guide and we had several friends coming along with us, so we took the plunge.
Our’s was a “Bible Experience” tour led by Behold Israel and it was extremely well run. They managed all lodging, transportation and food and all were excellent. Especially the food. We had a full time guide, driver and bus and were joined though most of the tour by Amir Tsarfati who provides great information from both Jewish and Christian perspectives and gave bible lessons from the sites we visited.
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The week between Christmas and New Year’s is generally slow at work, giving me a chance to do a little photography. This year my wife was out of town visiting her sister so I shot a couple of sunsets in the far away city of San Francisco. OK, maybe it isn’t that far away. I just don’t go there very often!Continue reading
I was very much blessed this year with the opportunity to visit some amazing places, including two “trips of a lifetime” with my wife. I had the chance to spend time in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt along with making a few day trips to Yosemite (my local national park).
This left me with an overabundance of images to choose from for my annual list of favorites. I wanted to include images from a variety of the places I visited, so some photographs I really like have been left on the cutting room floor. Such is life. So here are my choices, presented in the order they were taken.
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Vermilion Sunrise Burn, Banff, Alberta (Kyle Jones)
I clearly need to post more – I hadn’t realized I’d only written one post this year (although I think it was a pretty good one). In an effort to rectify that, I plan to start a series of posts that each cover a 24-hour period. I’ll see how it goes, but my initial thought is that these will include planning, travel and technical stuff in addition to my normal sharing of photos. Let me know what you think in the comments and I’ll adjust based on feedback.
Today’s entry covers January 27, 2018. I was in Banff with a few friends for a winter photography trip. I’ve traveled with Alejandro many times and it always goes well. We have similar tastes in subjects and trust each other when we make a plan and decide where to shoot. We were joined on this trip by Aron and Matt. I was familiar with the work of each of them but we’d never shot together and I hadn’t even met Matt face-to-face before this trip. Fortunately we all got along really well and we were able to see some beautiful scenes. Continue reading
Wanaka Sunset, New Zealand (Kyle Jones)
I recently took a vacation with my wife to New Zealand and Australia, including 6 days based in Wanaka (rhymes with “Monica”) on New Zealand’s South Island. I figured I’d share my experience here, where it can hopefully be useful for anyone else planning to travel to that beautiful country. This wasn’t a “photo trip”, so while I did make sure to place myself in a couple of good locations at sunrise/sunset, it wasn’t the focus of my trip. With that in mind, this isn’t really a photo guide and some of the shots included are more for documentary purposes than artistic. I have included some thoughts about conditions that might be good for some of these locations and am including the equipment and settings I used for reference. I’m splitting this guide into three parts, the first covering some general thoughts, gear, and the area around Wanaka. Next is the Haast Highway and Lake Matheson and then the area South of Wanaka including Queenstown and Milford Sound.Continue reading
As with everything at year end, it is time for yet another top 10 list. In addition to your 10 favorite movies, albums, TV shows, sweaters, selfie apps, etc., here is the official list of my 10 favorite photographs I created in 2017. Trust nobody else, this is the definitive list! These may not necessarily be my best photographs, since best is always debatable and I want the list to include a sampling from throughout the year. Selecting images was especially challenging this year as I had a chance to visit some really special locations including Banff in the winter, Iceland, Yosemite, Grand Teton, Zion, Yellowstone and even beautiful Corvallis, Oregon for the total solar eclipse. I could have selected 10 shots that I really liked from a 12-hour period in Stokksnes and Jökulsárlón, Iceland and called that a good year. In the end I cheated and created a runner-up list you can check out here. Without further ado, and in the order taken, here are my favorites from 2017:Continue reading
I sat down at my computer last week and went about my annual process of selecting my ten favorite photographs I made this year. I always enjoy this and usually find it interesting. There are always some photos that I loved when I took them, often because of fond memories of the experience, that seem less spectacular overt time. There are others that just stick with me. There are photos that others really like that I’m not as enamored with, and some that I think are really cool that didn’t get much of a reaction from my friends. So I mix all that together and create a short list of my favorite photos and then work to cull that list down to ten.
This year was especially challenging and getting down to ten favorites forced me to cast asides some pictures that I really like! Next week I’ll share my favorites, along with some background information on each of them and why it was included. In the meantime, here are the honorable mentions (in no particular order).Continue reading
Tunnel View Stars – Yosemite National Park, California (Kyle Jones)
I truly enjoy making photographs at night. If I’m willing to give up some sleep and risk some cold, I have the opportunity to photograph some beautiful locations in relative solitude. It always amazes me how much detail modern cameras can pull out of a night sky. So with that in mind, here are some of my favorite night images from the last year.Continue reading
