Magazine Articles

Photographer Jon McCormack recently had a close encounter with a tiny organism that produces nearly 50 percent of the oxygen on the plant. Here’s how he describes his incredible close-up image of diatoms.

For those looking for a great marine wildlife photo experience, I can’t think of a better place than a trip to the Monterey Bay in California. Located approximately one hour south of San Francisco, the Monterey Bay spans from Santa Cruz down to Monterey with a surface area of approximately 450 square miles.

Anupam Thombre is a passionate wildlife photographer from India and he’s always ready to get the shot, which is why he packs some of the fastest shooting camera gear around in his bag.

The moment you press the shutter and make a photograph you flatten a world of three dimensions into two. Your chosen perspective is frozen forever, the foreground collapsed against the background into a space as thin as the media on which you print your work. But, incredibly, the feeling of depth—maybe more accurately, the illusion of depth—doesn’t always disappear.

Buried in winter nests of gravel in clear cool streams, fertilized salmon eggs are ready to hatch. Wiggling embryos release an enzyme, which causes the egg membrane to break. The newborns, called alevins, are about the size of a thumbnail. Alevins retain the egg’s yolk sac as a nutrient-rich lunch bag that provides the developing fish with food.

For the casual observer, it may not be obvious how personal style could possibly factor into any outdoor photograph. When nothing in an image is manufactured, staged, posed, or strobed, the totality of a photographer’s contributions could be obscure to such viewers. It may even seem generous to say that any photographer can ever claim full responsibility for results that owe so much of their force to nature’s whims.

Reuben Wu has a habit of turning personal passions into creative careers. First as a designer, then a musician, and now a photographer, Wu’s artistic drive knows no bounds. His hauntingly beautiful photographs juxtapose unnatural light with the natural landscape. He is equipment agnostic, using whatever device best serves his vision, including everything from drones to LED cube lights, fiber optics to medium format digital cameras.

The invention of photography, with its unique ability to record endless detail with optical precision, has had a larger effect on our understanding of the landscape than even classic paintings. In the 1860’s, expeditionary photographers revolutionized wilderness photography by creating stunningly detailed large-format views of the American West, while countless itinerant photographers with stereo cameras made tiny three-dimensional views of distant wonders so wildly popular that no well-to-do Victorian household was without its parlor-room stereo card collection.