Japan in winter

Well, it’s only taken me 20 years but I finally made it to Japan!

I first heard of the Japanese/Manchurian/red-capped cranes back in the late 90s and was totally fascinated by their courtship dancing. Ever since I have been wanting to photograph them. Later I found out that during the winter you can also see the snow monkeys chilling in a hot spring and Steller’s sea eagles on the drift ice… I was sold. But the right moment never came and this trip has sat in a dusty corner of my bucket list for 20 years.

I have put together a sample gallery with images from this past February. Subjects include:

• Japanese Macaque (Macaca fuscata)

• Red-crowned crane (Grus japonensis)

• Whooper swan (Cygnus cygnus)

• Steller's sea eagle (Haliaeetus pelagicus)

• white-tailed eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla)

• Black(-eared) kite (Milvus migrans lineatus)

• Yezo sika deer (Cervus nippon yesoensis)

• Ezo red fox (Vulpes vulpes schrencki)

The full collection will be live at Getty Images later this year, in the mean time feel free to contact me for licensing.

The changing San Francisco skyline

In the 12 years I have lived here, SF the skyline has been slowly evolving, adding more and more glass skyscrapers in the SoMa area. However, in the last few months with the completion of the Salesforce Tower that change has been brutal and very, very obvious.

The Salesforce tower is the second highest building in the west coast and is now visible from all of the traditional SF skyline view points. If we add to this that most of the work to remove the old bay bridge is now complete we will find that most existing skyline photos have become obsolete almost overnight.

Over the past few weeks I have been taking advantage of the clear weather to re-photograph many of these views and will be adding more over the coming months.

The samples below are taken from the Marin Headlands, Upper Market, and Alcatraz Island... I'm really looking forward to fog season to see how it will interact with the new downtown skyline!

New work on Getty Images

Over the last few months I have uploaded quite a bit of new material to Getty. The new work covers some exotic locations such as Iceland in winter, the sandhill cranes of Bosque del Apache, winter landscapes from Utah and Wyoming, as well as local California material from the Sierra to the Monterey Bay.

Since much of my work on Getty had been cobbled together from direct submissions and through the acquisition of Oxford Scientific, my credit lines were all over the place. We finally got them all rounded up and merged under one unified by-line so you can now click the author name and go to a gallery containing ALL of my Getty portfolio.

Check them out here

More book samples

Work on the book series is progressing at a good pace. While the search for a publisher for "Frozen" continues  I'm now working on the second book of the series, "South", and sketching out the concept for the third, "Coasts".

"South" will make a great companion book for "Frozen", as it describes the fauna and landscapes of the sub-antarctic regions that surround Antarctica. Tierra del Fuego, the Falkland Islands, South Georgia, etc.

"Coasts" is a more ambitions project and covers a selection of coastal habitats from around the globe.

Coming soon... Book!

Cover options, page layouts, marked up edits, and printing / binding prototypes for the pocket edition

A personal project that I have been working on for 11 years is very close to completion. Since 2005 I have been working on a photo book about the Antarctic Peninsula. It spans five years of photo work and six years of procrastinating. A couple of months ago I finally got around to making the final photo selections, re-processing all the selects in Aperture, and designing the actual book layout.

I used Blurb to produce three mock-up prototypes to test and fine tune the color reproduction and the final layout flow. I have to say that I'm positively surprised by the speed and quality of the results. Print on demand has come a long way in the last few years and I wish this technology had been available in my days as an Art Director!

As of today all that is pending is final copy for two essays that I hope to finish before the end of the year. Once those are complete I'll be offering the book in two formats: a "coffee table" edition (8x10 hardcover with printed dust jacket) and the "pocket" edition (5x8 paperback) seen in the photo above.

While I have had my work printed in books before, and in the past I have designed many books for other photographers, this will be my first solo book and I'm really excited about the results.

Stay tuned for updates!