The Sacramento Valley of California is one of those places that lies (mostly) between destinations. Trying to get to Oregon from the Bay Area? Make a speed run up Interstate 5. Need to get to an international airport from anywhere in California north of Sacramento? Time for another speed run down I5. Headed to Disneyland from Seattle? Yep down the Sacramento Valley on I5. It seems as if everyone has somewhere else to be.

But what if you take a little time off the freeway?

At first you may still be in a gray mood.

But the flowers and sky can brighten the day.

A wall of almond flowers fills the air with a sweet scent.

The sound of millions of honeybees hard at work fills the quiet.

All of this might leave you a bit frazzled.

But as you merge back onto the industrial artery of I5 even the agroindustrial scenes blend into the darkening sky and the trip is a little brighter.
Someday we need to shoot the Sac Valley in the fog. But for now we have somewhere else to be.

Boyd TurnerApril 19, 2024Comment

Yosemite Valley

For landscape and nature photographers a trip to Yosemite Valley is filled with longing and dread. We long to stand in the spots made famous by Ansel Adams and so many other incredible photographers. We long to bask in those magnificent views. We dread having our images compared to those famous shots. We fear we will find our work so far short of the mark that we ask ourselves the existential question: “Why am I doing this?”

We visited Yosemite Valley for a few days in late February. We stood at some of the famous places. We stood in some unknown places. We made a lot of images. We hope we made some images that show Yosemite Valley in a way you might not have seen before or in ways that rekindle your own memories. And yes, the Valley smiled on us and we avoided the existential question of why. This trip.

(All these images are lightboxed so if you click on them they will open in a separate window. This should help you to see the whole image for vertical crops and larger images for horizontal crops)

Blue skies over Mirror Lake on a sunny afternoon

Yosemite Falls on a cold winter morning refracting the sun

Ground fog and a hint of morning color fortell a return of winter

Red sky at night, photographer’s delight

Gathering storm over the Gates of the Valley

The blue sky is a memory as the granite is caressed with gray mist

the gray mists envelope the Valley and force our retreat from the storm.

Boyd TurnerMarch 27, 2024Comment

Robin Wood

Robins drop from sky
Snow collects on the branches
Winter in Robin Wood

Boyd TurnerFebruary 17, 2024Comment

Favorites of 2023

Yes, it’s almost February. We had a busy year, so it took a while to select some of our current favorites from 2023. We started with a big group of favorites we liked in our own work. In other words Kathy picked from her catalog and Boyd picked from his catalog. Then Boyd picked some of Kathy’s and Kathy picked some of Boyd’s. Then we whittled them down. To get this down to just a few images each requires eliminating some favorites. I’ve read that other photographers compare the last step in this process to “drowning puppies.” That might be harsh but it is undeniably hard to not include some images.

So here are 14 of our favs from 2023. As usual they are “lightboxed” so you can click on an image and see it full screen on which ever device you are using. (Personally we favor a BIG high res monitor.) Enjoy!

His Majesty’s Royal Cabbage - Balmoral, Scotland

Dance of the Costa - Patagonia State Park, Arizona

Buns of Sand - White Sands National Park, New Mexico

Rings and Bubbles - Yellowstone National Park

Beach gold and azure - Cape Blanco, Oregon

Scottish Blues - Tobermory, Isle of Mull, Scotland

Boyd TurnerJanuary 26, 2024Comment

Textures of 2023

Light, line, shape, color, and gesture make photos we love. But texture also attracts our eyes and our cameras. Here’s a dozen of our favorites from 2023. We love the feel of these images from wispy to gritty. Hope you love them too. Click on each to see a larger version.

Boyd TurnerJanuary 20, 2024Comment

After the Scottish rains

When in the night we wake and hear the rain
Like myriad merry footfalls on the grass,
And, on the roof, the friendly, threatening crash
Of sweeping, cloud-sped messengers, that pass
Far through the clamoring night; or loudly dash
Against the rattling windows; storming, still
In swift recurrence, each dim-streaming pane,
Insistent that the dreamer wake, within,
And dancing in the darkness on the sill:
How is it, then, with us—amidst the din,
Recalled from Sleep's dim, vision-swept domain—
When in the night we wake and hear the rain?
Robert Burns

Boyd TurnerDecember 19, 2023Comment

How do you want your castle?

Castles come in many shapes and sizes. How would you like your castle to be? Big? Small? Here are some ways to have your castle if you are in England or Scotland.

Maybe you want your castle traditional, royal and large.

Maybe you want your castle tall and brooding over a strategic body of water.

Maybe you want your castle with turrets and cannon.

Maybe you want your castle to have a small entrance, difficult for enemies to force.

Maybe you want your castle to have a grand entrance over a bridge.

Maybe you want your castle in the middle of the Loch.

Maybe you want your castle with armored knights.

Maybe you want your castle protection a little more modern.

Maybe you want your castle with a pensive princess waiting on her prince.

Maybe you want music in and around your castle.

Whatever you want in a castle, there are plenty of ideas in the Great Britain castle design center.

Boyd TurnerDecember 6, 2023Comment

Textures of Yellowstone Summer

As we travel, we seem to find there are certain features that stand out about an area. Maybe it’s the hummingbirds in Costa Rica. Maybe it’s the walls of Tuscany. Maybe it’s the flowers of a desert springtime. For us, in Yellowstone, the features that stand out are the textures.

Yellowstone is rightfully famous for the geothermal features. But as photographers it is hard to get photographically excited about Old Faithful. Millions of photos have been taken of Old Faithful just this summer. But by spending a little more time in the park, we noticed the geothermal areas also had a wide variety of textures. And then we started seeing textures all around the park. There are the smooth pool surfaces and the rough edges at hot springs.

There are the textures where deposits have built up for millennia creating ledges on ledges on ledges.

And the frothing of the mud pots generates textures that hint at somewhere that may exceed Dante’s imagination, a place of boiling souls screaming to escape.

Yet some pools are calm with a zen-like, meditative feel to their texture. How long does the bubble exist?

Besides the geothermal areas, the grasses of midsummer are a tangle of lines and texture and color shifting away from the greens of spring.

Even the wildlife contribute to the palette of texture.

And as the grass dries and the bison shed, eat and procreate, the hot springs, mud pots and geysers provide a show of building new textures.

Meanwhile above the geyser basins and hot springs, above the bison and the grass, the sky is also textured and hints at changes to come and the end of the shortest season.

Boyd TurnerSeptember 3, 2023Comment

Sisters Rodeo Slack Day 2023

What is a ‘Slack Day” and why is it in this blog? Good questions buckaroos. The first part is easy. Slack Day is a day between ‘performances’ when competitors who couldn’t get into the regular performance part of the rodeo get to compete. Maybe there were too many steer wrestlers to fit the allotted time in the performances. At the Sisters Rodeo it is also free to watch and photographers (Boyd in this case) can stand next to the arena fence. So it is a great opportunity to make some images of a pretty unique piece of western culture. So are you ready to pull up your Wrangler’s and tighten up that belt? Let’s Rodeo.

For those who aren’t sure what these images are about let’s start with steer wrestling. The idea is to jump off a horse onto a steer weighing about 500 pounds, and as quickly as possible throw the steer to the ground. Oh and the steer is running as fast as it can. Which means the horse is also running pretty darn fast. Yes 180-pound man tackles 500-pound steer from the back of an 800-pound horse in under 10 seconds. Easy Peezy. What could possibly go wrong?

Maybe steer wrestling is too brute force for your taste. Maybe team roping is more in your corral. Start with a calf in the chute, a cowboy on a horse with a lariat (that lasso thing) on each side of the chute. Throw one lasso around the horns of the steer. Then the other cowboy throws a loop around the back legs of the now spinning and angry calf. There is a lot going on in this event and I didn’t do too well capturing it.

Two horses, two cowboys, two horns, two loops, too much? Then try tie down roping. Just you, your horse, a big loop of rope, a little loop of rope and a calf. Much simpler: lasso the calf, jump off your horse, throw the calf to the ground, use the little rope to bind the calf’s legs, raise your hands up to stop the clock. Yes this is a timed event. And you might be getting the idea that the horses are maybe more important than the cowboys.

And if you think this is a cowBOY only day you would be mighty wrong there fella. The barrel racing is an all cowgirl event involving 3 large empty barrels, one large horse and the ability to get around all 3 in the quickest possible time. Oh and you have to do it in a cloverleaf fashion. Knock over a barrel and get time added as a penalty. Can you stay on a horse that just went to 0 mph from a full run in 2 of your steps? Didn’t think so.

And that my vaqueros is a taste of Slack Day. Maybe next year we’ll pony up for a performance and get some saddle broncs and bull riding images. Yeehaw. And with that thought: TIME!

Boyd TurnerJune 19, 2023Comment

Downloads? Yes!

So we are trying something new. We have added a download page. Just click on Downloads at the top of this page. For now we have four titles available. The most recent is “White Sands Black Shadows”. This features 29 images from White Sands National Park. Then we have “Rushing Patience”. Water and rock make for a set of color images we enjoyed making and sharing in a book-like format with some related text. This PDF is best viewed as two pages side-by-side.

The third PDF is “Mountain Monochromes”. Being outdoors people we are drawn to mountains. And last but not least is “The National Park Posters” which is a collection of images made in units of the US National Park System. This collection is formatted with text in the style of Park Posters from the late 20th century.

We are hoping that putting images in PDFs will help you to view the images as they were intended to be seen. For the “Mountain Monochromes” and “National Park Posters” this means you can download and see these images on your larger monitor and enjoy the image as originally formatted, without the cropping constraints of Instagram. For “White Sands Black Shadows” and “Rushing Patience” we hope you will enjoy the sequencing of these image sets. Instagram and social media in general just don’t allow a set of images to be laid out and sequenced in a way that allows the viewer to not only linger over an image, but to delve into a longer subject.

We hope you try this out with us. We think you will find some images you enjoy and want to share. And sharing is another trait of PDFs and why we keep up this website. We want to share some of the beauty and interesting things we see when out with our cameras. So grab a favorite beverage, turn off that streaming service and try something different with us.

Yep - nothing happened when you clicked on the images. You have to go to the Downloads link at the top of the page. We will work on doing links on the journal entry sometime in the future.

Boyd TurnerMay 25, 2023Comment

Journal

Robins drop from skySnow collects on the branchesWinter in Robin Wood

Robins drop from sky
Snow collects on the branches
Winter in Robin Wood