CHEERS TO A NEW YEAR!

2022 has been a year for the record books. A year filled with many adventures, opportunities and new experiences. New friends were met, old friendships were reunited and many many images were created.

Throughout the year we were able to travel across the globe, working in the name of conservation, curiosity and education.

We want to share the accomplishments of our year with you and as always we like to do it through the images that were made along the way.

We started my year off to a visit to California to photograph a variety of projects we are working on including the marine mammal rookeries in La Jolla, CA. I was able to meet a friend of mine Jules Jacobs while I was there and we spent an afternoon photographing the seals and sea lions together. After, I traveled to Washington D.C. to attend the Imaging USA conference for the Professional Photographers of America. I took advantage of being in D.C. and took a morning to do a little sightseeing along with photographing my favorite D.C. animal, the grey squirrel.

Next we were off to Oregon to be the keynote speaker and workshop leader for the Winter Wings Festival. This festival is a great opportunity to photograph birds that winter in the Klamath Falls area including the largest congregation of bald eagles in Oregon.

We then headed down to the Texas Gulf Coast to photograph whooping cranes. Whooping Cranes are a great success story of how a species can be on the brink of extinction and with the help of conservationists make an incredible come back. The majority of whooping cranes will winter along the gulf in Texas. During one of our trips to the gulf we joined fellow photographer Alyce Bender on a boat charter.

Burrowing Owl Recovery Program: While in California in January I went on assignment for Outdoor California Magazine to cover a story about the Burrowing Owl Recovery Program being conducted by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. I photographed the team building temporary aviaries and photographed as the team translocated nine western burrowing owls to a new location on CDFW land in San Diego County.

My full length feature story was published in the May / June issue and was my first text / photo story to be featured in a major publication.

Mexico, Honduras, Belize: In March we traveled to the Caribbean to photograph some sub-tropical wildlife. Our first stop was in Mexico, where we spent the day snorkeling with the fishes. Next we stopped in Honduras, where we photographed our first wild scarlet macaws, capuchin monkeys and iguanas. Our last stop was in Belize, where we took a boat out to the lagoon photographing pelicans, cormorants and manatees. Back on land we made a photograph of this beautiful blue morpho butterfly.

Spring Grand Teton: In May I led the first of two photo tours to Grand Teton National Park. Our trip was filled with great encounters with grizzly bears, moose, elk, deer and lots of birds. One of the evenings it began to snow and when we woke the next morning the park was covered in a beautiful layer of white snow. It made for some magnificent landscape photographs.

Cheetah Conservation Fund: In June we were invited to travel to the field center in Namibia for the Cheetah Conservation Fund. We spent several days covering every aspect of the operations including visiting local farms to see their livestock guarding dogs in action, CCF’s model farms, the scat detection dogs and of course their ambassador cheetahs. One of the biggest highlights was meeting the team from India who was reintroducing cheetahs to India. I photographed the medical workup of two wild cheetahs set to be released. Of course spending time with Dr. Laurie Marker is the highlight of any CCF trip and photographing 3 baby cheetahs as well as my favorite boy Dominic.

Namibia Photo Tour: Directly from CCF I met up with my tour clients for our long awaited Namibia Photo Tour. This tour was suppose to take place in 2020 but like everyone else, we needed to wait till the time was right for traveling. Our tour included the Red Sand Dunes of Sossusvlei, the coast to see cape fur seals, the desert elephants, Etosha National Park, a stop back to CCF and lastly Erindi Private Reserve. We saw countless amounts of wildlife but some of our highlights were 6 wild cheetahs, 11 lions, dozens of elephants, hundreds of zebras, 2 African wild dogs, kudu, black backed jackals, baboons, Oryx, flamingos, cape fur seals, giraffe, Ostriches, hyena and lilac breasted rollers. Just to name a few.

Girls Who Click in La Jolla: Soon after arriving home from Africa I headed back to California to lead a photo workshop for the non-profit Girls Who Click. I love running these workshops for these teen girls getting them excited about conservation photography. June / July is a great time to be photographing in La Jolla as most California Sea Lions are born on June 15th, providing tons of opportunities to get pictures of the new pups. The city of San Diego finally closed the sea lion rookery for the first time for pupping season, we were were able to photograph the pups without them being harassed by tourists.

Washington State: In August I traveled up to Washington State to scout for a future photo tour for Wildside Nature Tours. We traveled from Spokane to Seattle, through Mount Rainier, across to Multnomah Falls in OR and along the Columbia Gorge back to Spokane. This trip is littered with magnificent views of mountains, waterfalls, rolling hills, wildflowers and of course wildlife.

Grand Teton Fall Photo Tour: In September I led my second tour of the year to Grand Teton National Park. My clients and I had some spectacular wildlife and landscape opportunities including photographing a double rainbow over the Mormon barns, the Milky Way, the fall color, as well as moose, black bears, pronghorn, elk, coyote and bison.

Fall in Texas: As fall turned into winter my travel turned into art shows and moving to San Antonio. We participated in 11 art shows in 3 months ( a new record ) as well as judged a photo contest for a local camera club, was a guest on a podcast, and led 2 online workshops. When we weren’t selling or teaching we were exploring our new city of San Antonio, photographing the lights at Riverwalk, longhorn, raccoons, crested caracara and was asked to photograph about 15 show breeding dogs for the Raising Star Ranch.

It has been by far the most productive year of our career with more successes than we can even put down in this blog post. But most importantly we couldn’t do any of this without the support of our family, friends, colleges, editors, clients and partner organizations. Thank you everyone for an incredible year and we can’t wait to see what gifts 2023 brings.

Happy New Year!!!!!