I recently returned from a great workshop in and around Charleston, SC, visiting locations like Folly Beach, Botany Bay, Middleton Plantation and the historic streets of old town Charleston. It is a fantastic area to photograph. The image above was taken in the morning before sunrise at Botany Bay where several trees stand offshore and many photographers stand onshore!

The image below is from Middleton Plantation, a large estate of beautiful gardens, ponds, farm animals and 18th century buildings. The azaleas had just started blooming the weekend I was there.

This next image is of Folly Beach with the rocks and the seawall framing the Atlantic Ocean and rising sun. To see more images from this visit to Charleston, click here.

My very first visit to Death Valley National Park was a total surprise. Whatever my preconceived ideas of this park were, they were totally wrong. I was shocked by the variety of color in this place. This was not the drab, vast wasteland I thought it was. It is a beautiful and exotic world where even the color of the sand is breathtaking and the salt formations of the Badwater Basin area appear other-worldly.

The nearby Alabama Hills also hold fascinating rock formations and colorful evenings.

This is definitely an area that should be on every photographer’s must see locations list. I will certainly be returning (but not in the heat of summer since temps can top 120 degrees!!) To see more images from this spectacular area, click here.

Just returned from a great workshop last weekend in St. Augustine, Florida. Three days of wonderful sunrises and sunsets, plus it wasn’t too bad being in 70 degree weather! The shot above was taken in early morning, pre-sunrise light. The area was located just south of Marineland outside of St. Augustine. The shoreline along this part of Florida features coquina rock which has fantastic shapes and patterns.

As for sunset, you can’t get a much more spectacular sky then we had in the shot below. Taken from the shoreline under the Francis and Mary Usina bridge which carries State Road 1A over the North River from St. Augustine to the Vilano Beach area.

Well after sunset, this view of the pier at St Augustine Marina had a surreal feel with the green cast from the fluorescent lighting of the pier and the purplish color of the sky. More images from the workshop are at this link.

The last day of my trip to Oregon and California started off at sunrise on the beach at MacKerricher State Park near Ft. Bragg, CA. It was overcast and gloomy at the hotel but by the time we arrived at the park, the skies looked promising but the light show that followed was totally unexpected. There is a great line of posts planted along the beach that provide a wonderful graphic element and when you are lucky to have an incredible sky….

Along this same stretch of beach is the remnant of a large tree stump. I had to work between incoming waves that surrounded the stump but it was worth photographing this beautiful piece of wood. If you would like to see more, my gallery of images from this trip can be found at this link.

A walk through a redwood forest is a unique experience. The coastal redwoods that range from southern Oregon to central California are the world’s tallest trees, standing up to 320 feet in height. These images are from the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park outside of Crescent City, CA. This park contains some of the most often photographed redwoods along the Stout Grove Trail.

The beauty of the moss covered tree below was highlighted by the early morning light and fog.

Bandon State Park in Oregon offers incredible landscapes featuring an amazing variety of sea stacks. It’s just one of those places that makes you think of alien worlds. The morning that our workshop photographed there was very special. It included one of the most magnificent skies I have ever seen.

Bandon beach offers enormous opportunities for compositions throughout the day and is a highly recommended stop for any photographer.

Looking in areas marked as tidal pools on maps, we were coming up empty for marine life, but traveling along Highway 101 near the coast we spotted huge fins in the ocean which turned out to be a pod of Orca whales migrating south. We pulled over to watch them and noticed a grouping of rocks in front of us where a large number of harbor seals were resting. To get a closer view of the seals, we scrambled over some rocks and ran smack into the most amazing tidal pool I have ever seen, filled with sea stars and anemones everywhere you looked.
(workshop guide info)