Last week I took the opportunity to photograph several amazing sights in Yosemite National Park ranging from night & astro landscapes, moonbows and blooming Dogwoods. The later is what captured my eye by day. This is the first time I’ve seen Dogwoods in optimal conditions. In the past I’ve always seen them after a storm or a little too late in the season. One thing I can say after seeing Dogwoods in p

Yosemite Sunrise I was revisiting some old film scans from several years ago thanks to a client request and rediscovered this photo. Slide film isn’t very forgiving in regard to dynamic range, but I always liked the contrasty nature of this photo. It was taken on a cold snowy winter morning well before sunrise. Taking a long exposure allowed for the faint color in the sky to register quite strongly which I alwa

When you first enter Yosemite National Park it is impossible to miss El Capitan. Towering some 3,000 feet above the valley floor with a peak elevation of 7,573 feet its a feast for the eyes and an attractive challenge for several hardy rock climbers. The more I visit Yosemite the more I see visitors accept the walls of the valley as an unmoving constant, but if you stop to really watch the valley walls you’ll n

Photography is about a lot of things and other than “light” I’d say the “journey” is the most important. The fantastic thing about photography is that one’s mastery of the medium & artistic vision is a journey as much as the quest for each photo. Just as you never know what is over the next hill to photograph you never know how your view of the world might evolve. In both regar

Friend and filmmaker Steven M. Bumgardner (@yosemitesteve) has released  ”One Day in Yosemite“, a short film created by 30 filmmakers who spread out across Yosemite National Park to document a wide spectrum of activities that occur in one 24 hour period. This short film was an incredible logistical challenge that after months of editing sheds light on the concentrated diversity of activities one can enjoy

To gaze upon a sunrise is a treasured moment, you only get so many opportunities to see them. Keeping that in mind it always pays to get up early. John Muir also had an eloquent quote, “God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.”  I couldn’t agree more, but it’s easy to see how he came to that conclusion witnessing so many sunrises in Yose

Today the JMG-Galleries.com Blog jumps into its 3rd major incarnation with a new design. Over the past 18 months my old blog has become increasingly difficult to work with for a variety of reasons and it’s been a driving factor in my blogging less and less as of late. It’s tough to stay in a groove when you’re constantly fighting technical gremlins. While I consider myself a perfectionist, I can say

One aspect of night photography that I particularly enjoy is the slow calm of the stars and moon passing over. For some this might seem as exciting as watching paint dry, but when you’re under billions and billions of stars that slow calm quickly gives way to pure awe. This still is from a time-lapse, so at some point soon I’ll share what this scene looked like as it unfolded in a faster timeframe than th