Back in the slide film days I used to work much harder at getting good landscape images. We worked much slower in the film days. And I really put thought into good composition. But with the digital age, I’ve gotten a bit lazy. Too easy to just snap some quick photos with my iPhone and call it a landscape. But having access to a drone has made me think more about aerial landscapes and I’ve included four of those images here…Roughly 30 percent of my favorite landscape images this year were with the drone.

I do enjoy very wide images and so have also been using my 10mm Rokinon lens on the Sony A6500 body.

Here’s my faves from 2019.

Some of you may know where this little gem is located. The cedar tree that I used to include in my compositions here, is now tipped over. A long exposure made for a colorful pattern of swirling foam and leaves. Did I put that maple leaf on the rock? Only I know!

I absolutely love the new perspectives the we can get with drone images. But I am still learning on how to be a good drone pilot (I have crashed my DJI Phantom 4 a few times).

I was passing through southwest New Mexico on my way to southeast Arizona for a birding trip when I saw this scene. I love the drama of Yuccas…and the clouds helped make this image. For this look I desaturated this image, and increased the “clarity” slider, in Lightroom.

Yes, a very simple “tree silhouette” landscape, but I like the vertical trunks contrasting with the horizontal bands of color in the sky. This is well past sunset.

You could only get a shot like this with a drone (or a really tall ladder!). I like the different shades of blue and yellow as the lake begins to thaw in spring.

What do you do after you get back to your campground in Yellowstone? Eat dinner and take star photos! A headlamp briefly turned on illuminated my face.

I’d seen photos like this taken from a plane in the “pre-drone” era. Knowing that I could never afford to rent a plane, I gave up on making an image like this. But a drone now allows some very unique shots at a fraction of the cost.

Ryan and I have photographed this thermal feature in Yellowstone before, but on this evening it had a completely different feel due to the thick steam arising from the pool. We stood on the top rung of the barrier fence and held our cameras high to get a more pleasing angle on the scene.

Aerial view of Lake Superior ice during break up. I converted to black and white for a more graphic image.

I love the splash of color on this atypical landscape photo. What else can you do on an extremely gloomy day? Ryan got even lower to the road and also made a very cool image.

Mammoth Hot Springs Terraces

I’m not sure why Ryan and I had never noticed this big ol’ Cottonwood in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley before…Maybe because we were always looking for wildlife. But on this year’s trip Ryan saw it and named it the Zen Tree. It has wonderfully gracefully arced limbs and trunk, and it is very photogenic.

I actually had to stick my hand and camera into a bramble of spiny Cholla cactus stems to get this wide angle view of the Sonoran desert landscape near Tucson. I love how everything is framed by the Cholla (except the foreground Saguaro could be placed a bit better). Overall a unique view of a very unique habitat.

Ryan and I often break up the 17 hour drive home to Minnesota from Yellowstone with a night and half a day in Teddy Roosevelt National Park. The 36-mile auto loop is a fantastic road for wildlife photography…And no crowds!
Prairie Dogs are truly charismatic critters. How can you not like them? Well, I guess cattle ranchers hate them as cows can step in a hole and break their legs. But they’ve been successfully eradicated on much of the private lands of the west.

We tried this unique shot last year but came up empty (Not every wildlife photo must be taken with a telephoto lens!). We placed our cameras with a wide angle lens near the mouth of a Prairie Dog hole…then we retreated to the hillside and waited to trigger the shutter remotely. But Prairie Dogs have interconnected tunnels with many exits/entrances, and they usually outsmarted us. And the same thing seemed to be happening to us this time, but after we had given up and were heading back to the car, one Prairie Dog seemed reluctant to go down his hole as I approached. Maybe curious, maybe young, maybe not too experienced, but “brave” enough to poke his head out to check out the “three-legged predator” just outside his home. “Click” …got the shot. [Canon 7D with Sigma 10-20mm lens at 16mm, f13 at 1/800, tripod with remote trigger]

The North Dakota badlands are much more lush and green than the South Dakota badlands [iPhone!]

Lark Sparrows are very common in Teddy Roosevelt but rare in northern Minnesota. It was a real treat to see and hear many along the auto loop. This guy posed in the tip top of a Rocky Mountain Juniper. [Canon 7D with Canon 400mm f5.6 lens, f5.6 at 1/250 (max flash sync speed), Canon 420EX flash and Better Beamer attachment (to extend the reach of the flash), handheld]

Western Meadowlarks are a symbolic bird of the grasslands of the American West. [Canon 7D with Canon 400mm f5.6 lens, f5.6 at 1/400, handheld from car (This is an exposure between firings of the flash…The flash needs to recycle after every firing, so it is best to set your exposure so even between firings you get a decent exposure of your subject.]

Check out those ears! Mule Deer, in fact, are named for their ears which are oversized as in Mules. It was a very dark, rainy, gray day so the color balance was a bit weird so I converted the image to black-and-white for better effect. [Canon 7D with Canon 400mm f5.6 lens, f5.6 at 1/640, handheld from car]

I love a couple things that most people dislike…gulls (no such thing as a “seagull”) and dark overcast skies for photography. And today I wanted to combine these two to create an artistic, out-of-the ordinary image.
How did I get so close to the gulls? Remember, these were all shot with a 10mm-20mm lens…So you need your subject to be VERY close in order to appear somewhat large in the frame. The answer is stale bread! Once in a while I buy a large bag of unsaleable bread products from the local day-old-bakery. They call these “wildlife bags” and for about $5 you can have lots of fun. The disturbing part is that this particular loaf I was using today was about 6 months old (It had been in my car all summer) and there was not a speck of mold on it! I just shudder to think what we are putting in our bodies. But gulls have stomachs of steel.
The look I wanted was a dark and gloomy sky with the gulls lit in flight with a flash. But to get this “cold-warm” look you need a special technique. First you set your camera’s white balance to “tungsten,” this makes the dark gray sky a pleasing blue. But if you just used straight-up flash on the gulls they would also look bluish. So you need to “warm up” the light from the flash. To do this, I velcroed on two 1/2 CTO gels…These are orange gels that turn the light from your flash a very warm hue…It would be the equivalent of setting your camera’s white balance to “shade.” for example.
I then enticed the Ring-billed Gulls to very close range with scraps of bread, bagel and english muffin. Most would come within 3 feet on foot…Not quite close enough. So I tried throwing the scraps in the air…that worked much better. So I’d throw the bread in the air and then hold the camera at arm’s length and just keep shooting. Fresh batteries allowed the flash to recycle fairly quickly but even so I lost many images to the flash not firing. The result is that the gulls white feathers are neutral to slightly warm instead of bluish…A much nicer look.
Flash is great fun…but it is not often used creatively on wildlife. I had a blast with this and if you want to be further inspired, read Joe McNally’s “Hot Shoe Diaries,” “The Moment it Clicks” or any of his flash books.

Flash with CTO gel in place.