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Top Photos 2025

So how did we do in 2025? Judge for yourself. Is there anything we could or should have done differently? I’d like to touch up many of these in various ways.. most images can benefit from revisiting a file with “fresh eyes”, but that’ll have to wait for for a specific need, like when I want to make print-ready copies, or when someone wants to license/use one of the images. In the meantime, enjoy these first draft results!

Bleached creosote trunks in the sun’s last light of the day, against deep shadows and white clay from ancient lakes. This is what I envisioned when I saw these creosote bushes in bright white sunlight against the deep dune shadows. A deliberate photograph happens in your mind first. The rest is just the details on how you get there.

One of the nice features of our winter light workshops in Death Valley is the sun never rising more than 31 degrees in elevation. And approaching the horizon at sunrise and sunset at a shallower angle, the best light of golden hour lasts much longer close to the winter solstice than it does even a few month later in March. So we can find and work more opportunities like this one, captured as the sun approached the apparent horizon to the southwest.

What an amazing sight and experience! Often the sunset light on Horsetail Fall doesn’t happen. When it does happen it may essentially be “colorful waterfall”. But sometimes it’s it’s intensely bright, scintillating spectacle, most analogous to seeing the sun’s corona during a total solar eclipse. In fact, while the color may fade to dark orange or red as the sun sets, the most intense and most compelling portion of the event can be 10 or more minutes earlier.

People travel the world to see and experience a total solar eclipse and get those rare minutes of extreme contrast light. I’ve seen the sun’s corona with my own eyes, and I get it. Landscape photographers hope for intense storm light, and chase storms to find intense sunlight breaking through or under dark storm clouds. There are times when the brightness and contrast are so great, the event transcends what seems possible. When we’re out with photographers and this happens, first I make sure that people get their faces out of their cameras and experience the full impact of looking at the event directly. Then I point out that “No one is going to believe this.” I then add, “And if they do, you’ve failed to convey the full impact of the event”. When the actual event seems impossible as we experience it, what we’re trying to capture and convey is also impossible. Prints are probably the least effective way of conveying these events, these experiences, since the brightness and contrast are limited. A bright transmissive medium like a very bright monitor technology may come close, but a projected image from a projector so bright that it hurts your eyes to look at the reflected image would probably be best. Most of us don’t have that, nor do the people that we’re sharing with, so we do the best we can.

It’s no surprise that people flock here for the possibility that they may once, or again, experience the repeatable scintillating light of the sun reflecting off of the water and wet rock alongside Horsetail Fall. Most of you may see “colorful waterfall” and think “What’s the big deal?” That’s OK. I get it. May you someday experience something that seems so improbable, so spectacular that you will be unable to adequately describe, capture, or convey it as well!

Red aurora borealis visible to the north, as the Milky Way rises and stretches across the sky. The green airglow is also a chemiluminescence of oxygen triggered by energy form the sun. There was a little bit of moonlight in the sky above from the recently-set moon, adding a slight blue tint to the sky.

From our night photography workshop in late May 2025. We held workshops in the area in May, June, July, and August, and our workshops ended before this season’s fire and smoke season got underway!

Most of Death Valley National Park’s 3.9 million acres are unvisited each year. Two-thirds of the Park’s roads are unpaved. Many of the Park’s most amazing sites will never be seen by the majority of the park’s 1 million visitors each year. These amazing sand dunes are covered in my 320-page guidebook, “Photographing California Vol. 2 – South”, on pages 135-139. The publisher retired, but the book is still available on my Web site while the remaining copies last. Although these nearly 700-foot tall sand dunes are considered to be a few feet shorter in height than Great Sand Dunes in Colorado, the sharp rise in a short distance to me makes these seem much more imposing. The light changes throughout the day and with the seasons, and the light and shadows on the dunes can be very dramatic. In some years we’ve found prolific wildflowers in the area.

Note the access notes in my book… the main road in is closed in the winter by Inyo County, and all entry routes are unpaved roads, so you’ll want to have a full size spare tire (the Park recommends two), ample tire repair supplies, an air pump (not a cheap one that will overheat, and not one that goes through your lighter plug and may blow that fuse), plenty of water, and ideally satellite communication ability in case of emergency (we have a mobile Starlink dish). Lori Hibbett and I lead photographers here each spring, and we carry these supplies and more (tow straps rescue boards, etc.). We’ve never had to use them, except to rescue tourists who have tried to explore in rental cars. While being prepared enables us to explore more areas, we don’t forget that the goal is photography time in stunning places and conditions, not hardcore four-wheeling. We’ll visit many of the best areas with photographers on our Death Valley backcountry expedition trip in March, join us for the adventure!

This humble shed (tiny house?) in Bodie State Historic Park makes great foreground subject due to its manageable size and its isolation from other potentially distracting objects. On this evening we had rainbows, sunset, lightning, dramatic clouds, and later in the night, aurora borealis!

Every once in a while we’re reminded that the sand in these dunes travels here on the wind. Fortunately, there’s much less wind off of the dunes, which makes perfect sense. If the wind were blowing sand where we were standing, over time there would be sand dunes in that spot. So a windy day isn’t the time to cancel your sand dune shoot, it’s simply time to break out the long lens and have some fun!

I’m so glad that people decided to go out hiking in this dust/sand storm. I wouldn’t want their lungs afterward, but it’s nice of them to be there for scale. On this morning, the wind was shifting on and off of the dunes for a while. The dust was coming from Cottonball Basin to the south, but at times significant amounts of sand were bring picked up in the sand dunes as well.

We’ll be back in Death Valley with photographers in March twice for spring trips, then in December for our annual “winter light” session. The sun only gets about 31 degrees high in December, and in 2026 we’ll have great conditions to shoot the Geminid meteor shower at night!

Portrait of a curvy and somewhat x-shaped sunny dune, with foreground sand texture leading into the scene (24mm). We were able to shoot a lot of compositions here to either side, as the sun slowly rose to the southeast. That’s one of the great advantages of shooting near the winter solstice: not only does the sun not rise very high, but it also rises at a very shallow angle, so the best low angle golden light lasts a LOT longer than it does just a few months later in spring! That’s OK though, in March we’ll have a lot of wildflowers to shoot, so we’ll do just fine with the longer hours of daylight on our spring trips.

This image was captured town the end of our night photography workshop in Bodie State Historic Park in late May/early June 2025. We have caught aurora borealis several times in the Bodie/Mono Lake/Topaz Lake area in the past 12-24 months. We’ll be leading more groups of photographers in Bodie in June and July 2026. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the space weather forecast!

The rising Milky Way and green aurora-like airglow reflect in Mono Lake. The natural light on the tufa is from a 14% crescent moon was setting to the northwest. This illustrates why it can be great to shoot a few days after the new moon, three nights in this case. Mono Lake is critical habitat for nesting and migration routes for millions of birds. Please don’t harass nesting osprey and other birds by lighting up the tufa, or by using bazillion-lumen headlamps or flashlights! The best lights for night photography have the lowest lumens that you can find. Preserve your night vision. Minimize your impact on other photographers in the area. It’s common courtesy, and you’ll be a more effective night photographer if you don’t blow out your night vision every time you move to a new composition. You usually don’t need to take two photos, one focused on the foreground subject (while ruining your night vision), the other focused on the stars. And almost never does it make sense to focus directly on the stars, unless you’re practicing pure deep space astrophotography with no foreground subject whatsoever. This is not controversial; it’s math, geometry, and basic photographic principles that every moderately experienced photographer should learn and know. In many cases you can focus once and shoot all night without refocusing. We teach photographers how, and why. We use 14-lumen flashlights, and 5-lumen headlamps, of slightly higher maximum lumen headlamps that can be adjusted down tremendously. (If you’re afraid of the dark, maybe night photography is not for you.)

This also illustrates why it can be great to shoot the Milky Way early in the season, when temperatures are moderate, especially at night and at altitude. The reduced turbulence in the air makes for better reflections, even in a lake 20 miles across, like Mono Lake.

Using a superzoom lens can result in you paying attention to distant compositions that you might otherwise miss if you’re looking mainly at wide to ultra-wide compositions. In this case, although there were light rays in the sky that looked great at midrange to wide focal lengths, some serious drama was unfolding on a smaller scale miles away, best captured at focal lengths closer to 300mm.

I had almost 200 favorites in my 2025 Favorites album, so there are dozens of images that I may prefer on any given day. Here are a few that didn’t quite make the top 10 on the day that I assembled the collection above.

So here’s a crazy statistic… our clients were right next to us for all but three of the photos on this page. One was a scouting trip for our new Redwoods and Rhododendrons itinerary this summer, two I simply left a camera running at night after we captured aurora borealis in Bodie last May. So if you want to have opportunities like these, join us for our workshops in 2026! We have some particularly nice opportunities coming up this year. With new destinations like the Oregon Coast and Horse Packing in the High Sierra, I already can’t wait to show you my favorite 2026 images in 2027!