Photographing Death Valley is largely a matter of timing. Forget about a summer visit and even a late spring trip is risky. Plan now for your photo trip for the last part of November through the first two weeks of March. This fifteen-week period of mid-winter is the only safe time to travel there. A recent April visit ran into 102˚ F. temps. Easter vacation trips in the past usually coincided with spring winds that blew sand and dust into all my gear. Summer temperatures range over 100˚ The summer of 2024 brought record temps, in the 130 degree range. Your camera equipment is too valuable for that kind of treatment. If you want to avoid any crowds...skip Easter Week, President’s Birthday weekend in February and the 49ers Death Valley Encampment, a regular event, held every year around the second weekend of November.

Look at your feet... don’t miss the strong, wind-blown patterns of sand all around you. Try a wide-angle lens to accentuate the relationship of those patterns around you to the patterns of the distant dunes. A 28mm, 24mm, 20mm, or even wider lens, especially used in a vertical format, will exaggerate these spacial relationships and will produce a strong image. If you were lucky, a strong overnight wind came up last night and blew away any foot prints while you slept. If foot prints are visible in your viewfinder, you should probably stick to the longer telephoto lenses and shoot over them. ​Unless you are trying to show man’s effect on this environment, you will probably not want foot prints all over your sand dunes. Bring out your wide-angles and concentrate on the panoramic shots. Watch the skies for vapor trails of jets.

Two miles south of Lee, Massachusetts, Beartown State Forest covers 12,000 acres with a large choice of trails. The Appalachian Trail passes through the eastern side of Beartown. One paved road runs down the middle of the forest to the thirty-five acre Benedict Pond (camping and boating). The loop trail around this pond offers many viewpoints of fall color reflecting in the clear waters. The Benedict Pond loop trail 42,12.0852N  73,17.006W shares the route with the Appalachian Trail for a half-mile as it loops around the south end of the pond. Morning is best to light up the red and yellow trees reflecting in calm coves. Several wooden planks cross muddy streams at the south end of the pond. For a short distance, the Loop Trail follows the Old Beartown Road (unpaved) and then hugs the pond’s shoreline again before circling the north end of the pond. This trail takes less than an hour to walk. It took me a half-day to photograph my way around, through the autumn color.

Highway 98 crosses the bay and makes a sharp right turn down the main street of Apalachicola, Florida, a fascinating place to explore. Weathered ruins of old building are scattered among beautifully-restored examples of classic Florida coastal town architecture. Walk the three-block-long waterfront between Water Street, Commerce Street, and Market Street where Highway 98 passes through the center of town. Galleries, bookstores, and restaurants slowed me down. I still found so much to photograph that I stayed all day to explore the town and its side streets and then waited for a sunset over the bay. I found a room for the night at an Apalachicola riverside inn on Water Street with a great view over the water.

​The next day started early when I awoke to see a dense fog over the bay. I grabbed my camera bag and headed for the riverside dock where a few shrimp boats were tied up. Old fishing boats make great subjects in foggy morning light. The working boat marina can be found one mile north of town, upriver at the end of Market Street. Twenty-four boats were in the harbor where I spent several hours wandering around looking for the best locations for my tripod. I walked to the far end of the harbor where some wrecked hulls had been hauled onto the beach. There were no luxury yachts or fiberglass pleasure boats there. Working fishing boat harbor scenes are always improved by a dense fog. Exposures are more consistent no matter where you point your camera. Background distractions are lost in the mists.

On October 1 the weather forecast called for overnight rain. A load of snow was dropped down the length of the Wasatch Range. All roads were still open, even the gravel road to the Albion Basin Campground at the far end of the canyon. I stopped at some of the spots where I had photographed autumn color the previous day. Snow on dark evergreens added to the textures and made many scenes monochromatic. After walking a few hundred yards up the trail to Cecret Lake, I turned around. The trail, covered with a blanket of snow, was difficult to follow. A light snow was still falling.

I headed back to my 4Runner. Albion Basin can get up to fifty feet of snow through a winter. In less than an hour, I drove back down Little Cottonwood Canyon, headed three miles north and drove the length of Big Cottonwood Canyon to the junction with the Guardsman Pass Road. Then I headed up to the summit. A large grove (2.5 miles up the road), that had lost all its leaves a few weeks ago and looked like bare aspens yesterday, had become a ghostly forest with all bare branches outlined with ice. Distant patches of yellow aspen added touches of color to high-key monochromatic scenes.

​I walked the length of this grove four times, using all my lenses, trying to capture changes of light as a muted winter sun briefly appeared through openings in moving layers of clouds. With all my camera gear, I finally returned to a warm car. I had dressed for a fall trip to Utah and not for a winter in the Yukon.