This year started off with amazing night views and stellar Milky Way shots, like the one above of the Milky Way over a small river near Grand Marais. The northern lights even made an appearance over another river. That’s shown in the view below.

While I’m not religious, I do enjoy photographing the phenomena of religion. Father Baraga’s cross is shown below. In the sky above, two satellites cross each other. Had I shot this shot at a slightly different moment they would have formed a cross in the sky. There are proposals to put thousands and thousands of AI data center satellites into orbit. Perhaps, there’s something to be said about photographing a cross under a sky where humans are trying to create an intelligence of their own.

Naming a certain movie here would seem to be cliché, but we seem to be living in a constant state of cliché where movies of the past weren’t fantasy. They were prophecy.

Speaking of AI, sometime between making the photograph of Baraga’s cross and the photograph of the road and pines below, Adobe’s Denoise started introducing new artifacts into my night-sky images — they appear as blue or green blobs that appear between branches of the trees — and even with the new feather and edge tools in Adobe Lightroom, images still get halos when using AI masks (as seen below). Those halos take a long time to manually burn away. So maybe we don’t have to worry about Skynet just yet.

Still, standing out on a road at night under the stars I can’t help to think about where we are heading. Sometimes we can’t see around the next bend, so we keep traveling until the next stretch of road appears. Other times the road seems to disappear into the infinity of the universe. We keep traveling, but never seem to reach the end.

Despite not knowing where we are going, I do know that we are seeing more and more human items in space, as the photo below testifies. Look at all the satellites in the sky as shown in a 25 second photo below. When I was a kid, if we saw one satellite in the sky at night we thought it was cool.

Now, not so much.

But all things do come to an end. That’s shown in the same photo below. I caught a meteor burning away into dust as it entered Earth’s atmosphere.

With summer turning to fall and the Milky Way’s core sinking below the horizon, this season of the night sky is coming to an end. I do fear that in the near future, what we had will be lost to our children. When tens of thousands of satellites cloud the view, I wonder if we will look back and wish we protected the views we once had.

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Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this week’s musings. If you want to learn more about photography, my 2027 photography workshops are open for registration and I have space available on my November online Lightroom class. Check it out if you’re so inclined. I’ll see you again in two weeks.

I was a little taken aback. He was talking about split neutral-density filters, which are also known as ND grads, and bracketing and using HDR to composite shots together. I’ve been using split neutral-density filters for decades and have been using bracketed shots since film days, and using HDR since I went digital. I’ve tested the two approaches against each other and found that while they produce different-looking photographs, there isn’t a meaningful difference in image quality. In fact, when shooting near large bodies of water, I’ve found that the bracketing method can produce visual artifacts that require significant editing time to fix, if they can be fixed at all.

Usually, I just write these things off as a YouTuber saying something provocative to increase engagement and move on. But I pay attention to this stuff because I’ve had workshop students arrive after watching photography videos online and buy equipment based on recommendations they’ve heard. Sometimes those recommendations work well for them. Sometimes they discover that what works for one photographer isn’t necessarily the best choice for the way they photograph.

In this case, though, I didn’t think his method for shooting sunrises and sunsets was bad advice. It was different from what I do, but it was a perfectly reasonable way of working if you like the look and don’t mind the extra computer work.

His method was to bracket three exposures, three stops apart, and then use Lightroom Classic’s HDR function to blend them. I’ve bracketed plenty of photographs and have no problem with the technique. I wouldn’t recommend a three-shot bracket with three stops between exposures. I’d use 1.5 to 2 stops at most. But we can quibble.

I generally don’t like to bracket when there is moving water or blowing vegetation because I don’t want to deal with ghosting, and I often don’t like the look of bracketed water. But it’s a perfectly valid technique. If that’s how you work, more power to you.

Personally, I mostly use split neutral-density graduated filters for sunrise and sunset photography. For the past year, I’ve mainly been using a 3-stop medium filter. You put the dark part over the sky, the clear part over the ground, and take a photograph. There’s no HDR blending required. The image is ready for editing.

ND grads have their own limitations, of course, and some photographers don’t like having to carry filters or put one on their lens. You need to understand their potential problems, although I find that a medium grad solves most of them.

With ND grads, sometimes the water is brighter than the sky, even though the sky is actually brighter in reality. Sometimes a tree or other object sticking above the horizon ends up darker at the top than at the bottom. These are not new problems. Photographers have been pointing them out since Galen Rowell popularized graduated filters in the 1980s.

Using them also makes you look old-fashioned.

I once read a photography podcaster say on social media that he laughs when he sees people using graduated filters.

That’s cool. He can laugh.

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The thing about photography, and art in general, is that there are a lot of ways to practice it and a lot of ways to achieve the results you want. There are all kinds of tools and techniques available to us. We live in a time of almost absurd choice, and I think that’s a good thing.

I’m not going to fault you for using one technique or another. If you like to bracket, that’s cool. If you like to use filters, that’s cool. If you want to do everything in Photoshop, have at it.

I believe that your style is, in part, taking photographs the way you like to take them.

What I don’t like are broad proclamations that a particular technique is inherently bad, especially when the person making the proclamation is selling an alternative.

I’m also always willing to test a technique, especially when a popular photography influencer promotes it. So yesterday, I went down to the Grand Marais harbor to photograph sunrise over the U.S. Coast Guard building.

The foreground I wanted was blocked by some new bushes, so I had to settle for something less than ideal. But it still provided a good opportunity to test the two techniques side by side.

First, I took a photograph using a 3-stop medium ND grad and a 6-stop solid filter. The 6-stop filter removed some of the texture from the water. I’m personally not a fan of super-textured water. I prefer a softer look.

The ND grad darkened the bright sky while allowing me to expose the foreground properly.

Then I removed the ND grad and took a three-shot bracket, with each exposure three stops apart.

In Lightroom, I processed the filtered photograph using my normal editing routine. If you want to learn how I do that, I’m teaching an online Lightroom class in November.

Then I processed the bracketed images using the technique recommended in the video.

The first photograph is the filtered version using my normal technique.

The second uses the bracketed exposures and the recommended HDR technique.

Here’s the HDR blend with Lightroom’s auto adjustments.

Here’s a screenshot of Lightroom showing the two techniques side by side. It’s pretty clear to me that, without going into Photoshop and blending an unblurred boat into the scene, the HDR version (left) leaves the boats blurry.

So, would I say that using that technique “does more harm than good”?

In this specific situation, you could certainly make that argument.

And that’s the thing about tools. They all have limitations and advantages. The trick is knowing which tool is appropriate for the situation, rather than believing that one tool is always better or that another “does more harm than good.”

Personally, I also prefer the filtered photograph. I like the way the water looks. There’s less weirdness around the sun, and the overall image looks more natural to me.

But that’s the beauty of photography.

You get to decide.

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Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this week’s adventure in photography. I’ll see you again in two weeks.

The parting shot is of a small waterfall near Grand Marais. Water levels are really low and there’s barely any water coming over it.

A few days ago someone asked if I’d been out photographing the fires.

I told them no.

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That might seem surprising coming from a landscape photographer, because dynamic conditions make for compelling photographs, and there are likely striking images to be made. But not every photograph that can be made should be made.

Wildfires aren’t tourist attractions. They are active emergency scenes. Firefighters, pilots, and incident crews are working long days under dangerous conditions, and they don’t need photographers getting in their way. That’s especially true when it comes to drones. If an unauthorized drone enters restricted airspace around a fire, aircraft supporting firefighting operations may have to stop flying until it’s clear.

That doesn't mean wildfires shouldn't be documented. Photojournalists and photographers working with fire agencies help tell that story while coordinating with incident managers so they can do their jobs safely and without disrupting firefighting efforts.

Outside the fire zones, there are stories photographers can tell, and there will be plenty of time to photograph the aftermath of the fire. There’s a story of the burned forest, the lost campsites and structures, and the eventual recovery. But while the firefighters are still doing their work, I think the best place for most of us is somewhere else appreciating and photographing the countless beautiful places that aren't at the center of the emergency.

Sometimes the best photograph is the one you choose not to take.

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Until next time

I’ll see you again in two weeks, and until then here is the parting shot.

How many of you have seen this photo that ran in the now defunct Sea Kayaker Magazine? It’s the first three-star photo in my catalog of over 230,000 digital images. It’s from June 2004. I have 1000s of images like this that saw the light of day over a decade ago and haven’t resurfaced anywhere.

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The interesting thing to me is that most of what we feel is “old work” is actually undiscovered work to most people.

It isn’t just older images; new images fall into the same pattern as well. I took this photo of hummocked ice near Grand Marais last winter. I love the image and think it’s one of my favorite from 2026, but it’s now buried under five months of other images. Looking at the statistics on social media very few of the people who follow my work even saw it. I have over two decades of work that fit this pattern, and that’s not including all my old slides! There have to be one or two good photos in those slide archives.

It isn’t just my work. I follow a lot of photographers, and I’ve noticed the same pattern. I seldom see their latest work let alone their older work. The only one that I happen to catch often is Bruce Percy, who happens to share his latest works via newsletter, and he’s able to do that because he seemingly works in low volumes of images.

Your audience, your family, your friends likely never saw the photo when you first posted it, or maybe you never shared it at all. This isn’t just a social media problem. Art critics, such as Harold Rosenberg, have argued that the art world often reaches towards novelty at the expense of archive.

I’ve even forgotten about my archive. Take the following photo as an example. I shot it back in 2007. I was on a bike tour from Duluth, Minnesota to Dubuque, Iowa. I shot this somewhere along the bluff near the Mississippi River in Iowa. Not only do I like it because I remember the trip, but I also like it because of the misty morning, the gravel road and how the hills in the background fade away. I shared it in a newsletter and on a blog that doesn’t exist anymore.

Forgetting about my own images, even ones that I loved, makes me want to dig into my archives and resurface a few now and then. An archive isn’t just a bunch of old reruns. It’s a way to add new introductions, not only to current work, but to what that current work was built on.

Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this essay, and I’ll see you again next week. If you happen to visit Grand Marais this summer, I just dropped off a bunch of new greeting cards at the North House Folk School. Most of them are older images.

For the parting image, here’s a new image from last Thursday night.

My bike has developed a loud creak every time it rolls. I recently had the hubs serviced, so maybe it’s related. Hopefully it’s something simple, but it's an unknown.

I parked my car a little downstream from the middle of the river, then rode my bike to a point about ten miles from the source. The river is running at about half its normal level, so I decided to skip those first ten miles. Now I’m sort of regretting that decision.

Tomorrow I’ll reach my car, and then I’ll have to decide whether to continue on to the St. Croix River, knowing it means a 35-mile bike ride back to retrieve my vehicle. That decision will probably depend on whether I can figure out what’s making my bike complain.

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Knowing this wasn’t really a photography trip, I left most of my gear at home, including my tripod. I brought three batteries, one memory card that can hold about 2,500 photos (I’ll never shoot that many on this trip), my Nikon Zf, and the 24-120mm f/4. It all rides in a dry bag while I’m on the raft.

As a photographer, it’s a little strange to be on a trip where photography isn’t one of the primary goals. But I’ve found that on active trips like this, camera gear often becomes more burden than benefit. Campsites rarely line up with the best sunrise or sunset compositions, so the tripod spends most of its time as dead weight. The Boundary Waters is the exception because there are so many campsite options.

When I’m on the bike, I’ve mostly been photographing people’s yard art. Since I’m traveling solo, there isn’t anyone to photograph in action except me, and selfies aren’t really my thing.

Honestly, I could probably get by with a smaller camera, something like the new Panasonic L10 or a Nikon Z50II with the kit lens. Either would weigh less, take up less space, and produce images that would be more than good enough for a trip like this.

While photography is never far from my mind, I’ve learned that sometimes it’s good to set it aside and simply enjoy the adventure.

That said... I now have a serious case of GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome).

Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this little diversion from the usual photography newsletter. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming in two weeks. In the meantime, if you’ve been thinking about joining me for a workshop, I’d love to have you along.

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Recently, I posted the above picture of driftwood on a Lake Superior beach between Bayfield and Washburn, Wisconsin. It was popular across my social media accounts, but particularly popular on BlueSky. Many of the comments suggested the driftwood looked like an alien or a Christian religious icon. That surprised me because all I saw was a cool piece of driftwood.

The next photo is of the same piece of driftwood, but from a different angle and from about 45 minutes earlier. I photographed it at 22mm instead of 18mm, which gives a different look and doesn’t distort the corners as much.

I personally like the first image better. The angle allowed me to compose the scene so the driftwood stretches across the frame while emphasizing the curves of the roots radiating from the central root ball. The clouds above subtly echo its form. It’s probably one of the best photographs I’ll make this year, not because it’s technically difficult, but because of the strong emotional response it seems to evoke in viewers.

One of the things that I love about photography is how small changes in perspective can completely change what people see and the emotional response they have.

The two photos were made of the same piece of driftwood on the same beach less than an hour apart. The subject remained the same. The waves washing up onto the beach stayed the same. Nothing moved but small grains of sand, yet the photographs feel different.

In the second image, most people will see a piece of driftwood resting on a sandy beach in the surf. In the first, viewers saw an alien, a religious icon, or eerily mysterious figure lying on the beach. I never saw any of those things when I made the photo. I only knew that by shooting from this angle and with a wide lens, I could make the driftwood appear elongated and direct the viewer's eye down the angled beach towards the cloud in the sky above.

Photography is often considered a record of reality, but photographers spend much of their time deciding how reality will be seen. A slight change in position, a different focal length, a lower camera position, a different filter, or waiting for a different wave can completely change how a scene is perceived. One of my photography teachers used to say that a photographer and subject are an atom. The nucleus is the subject, and the electron is the photographer and their choices. The photographer orbits the subject until they find where the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

A photograph doesn’t change the subject. It changes how we see it.

When photography works, it makes people see something they might have walked past without noticing. Sometimes that means revealing beauty or mystery, and occasionally it means causing half the internet to believe that a piece of driftwood is an alien visitor soaking up rays on a beach.

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Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this week’s essay. I enjoyed sharing the photos and taking them. I’m also going to shamelessly plug my 2027 Photo Workshops. They are open for registration and five of the ten still have spaces available. The others have wait lists available. You should join me.

I’ll see you again in two weeks. Until then, here is the parting shot.

During the last new moon in Grand Marais, the Milky Way’s core started to rise above the horizon at the reasonable time. By reasonable, I mean 11:30pm. By August, it’ll be 10:30 pm, and by September, it’ll be 9:12pm. Next month in June, because we have such long days and short nights, it will paradoxically not be fully dark until 12:09am, so while the core rises at a reasonable time, it won’t be visible.

Thus is the struggle for Milky Way photographers: stay out late and shoot until morning.

This year I’ve been fascinated by calm wave pools reflecting the stars. I returned to the spot in the opening photo to get reflections in both the pools. The first morning, it was just before the end of night and one puddle was reflecting clouds as you can see below. The next night that I went, it was perfect.

In this second photo, you’ll also notice the number of satellites in the sky. That’s too many for my taste, but when it gets close to the edges of the day, the rising sun hits the satellites while the ground is still in the dark. With more and more satellites launched into orbit each week it’s only going to get worse for photography. Already, it’s nearly impossible to take a 20-second photo without getting a satellite in it. Just 10 years ago, within a few photos you’d have a shot without a satellite in it. We live in the dusk times of easy night photography.

The above find was wild. One of the wave pools was just inches higher than the other. It had perfectly reflected stars! Waves washed into the lower pool causing the stars to blur. The big lake was so wavy, it blurred the star light into streaks.

Streaks of light across the water aren’t the only streaks that you see during the night. In the above image, the cloud-like formations in the sky that look like streaks are airglow. Airglow is a faint, natural luminescence emitted by the Earth's upper atmosphere. What happens is the sun warms up the particles in the atmosphere, and they get all excited. As they bounce into each other, they emit the glow that’s usually green. It's like a mosh pit in space.

Northern lights are similar in that the sun hacks a loogie in the form of a coronal mass ejection (CME) at us. Basically, trying to kill us with its power. When the CME hits our atmosphere all the particles get frightened, bounce around and run into each other in terror, and that creates the glowing lights.

It looks pretty though even if it could kill us.

While I like seeing the northern lights, I love photographing the stars. I especially like this new-ish style of night photography that everyone has seemed to gravitate to that is basically a landscape-style composition that happens to have the Milky Way in it where the sunrise or sunset would normally go.

I’m a landscape photographer, so it appeals to my personal preferences. It’s like the composition in the photo below of basalt columns under the Milky Way. The columns are about 1.1 billion years old, but that’s nothing compared to the 13.6 billion years that the Milky Way has been around. I’m in my mid-50s now, so I’m catching up. It won’t be long.

That’s the rub with Milky Way photography. It won’t be long until the next new moon. It won’t be long until the clouds go away. It won’t be long until the core sets for the season, and it won’t be long until dawn starts to turn the sky blue and the night is over.

Don’t wait too long or you’ll miss it.

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Until next time

Thank you for reading another essay of mine. I hoped you enjoyed it. If you’re interested, a few of my 2027 photo workshops still have spaces (see the schedule and register here). I’ll see you again in two weeks.

On Wednesday, May 13, 2026, China launched a Zhuque-2E Y5 rocket to put a payload of an “experimental test mass” into polar orbit. About an hour later, the rocket dumped its excess methalox fuel, which is a mixture of liquid oxygen and liquid methane, over the central United States. Sightings were reported all over, and I happened to be outside teaching a Milky Way photography workshop.

I was in the middle of taking a demo image to demo editing techniques and had my camera tied up with a 480-second exposure and was making my way back to the participants.

“What’s that over your head?” one asked.

I thought for a second she might have been seeing the battery bar on my headlamp even though the headlamp was off. She pointed out that it was above my head in the sky. I turned and saw a strange white glowing cloud-like thing in the sky. At first I thought it was a northern lights blob, but it wasn’t shaped right and then started to move in a line towards the north. I thought that maybe it was STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement), but it didn’t look like any STEVE I had ever seen.

From when we first saw it until it disappeared over the horizon was around 10 minutes.

To get my first shot, I had to get back to my camera, turn it off to end the exposure, and compose and shoot. I was doing a photo of my foreground for a Milky Way two-image blend technique that I teach and forgot that my focus was on the foreground and not the stars, so it was blurry. But I refocused from my second shot.

Unfortunately by then, the fuel dump had started to move behind the trees. I tried to take advantage of that by using the trees as a compositional device.

I think I like the vertical version better, but it was already behind the trees by this point.

The group I was teaching was slightly separated from each other with a rocky area in between, and I had been walking back and forth to the two parties to check in. The other group had a better view of the north, so I grabbed my tripod and camera and stumbled across the jagged rocks. By the time I got there it was to the northern horizon from where they were. There was a slight glow of the northern lights in the view.

At the time, it was incredibly cool to see. I thought for sure that we were seeing natural phenomenon, and felt my heart fall when I learned it was just a manmade phenomenon from a Chinese rocket dumping fuel over the United States. Spaceweather.com reported that Dan Bush who has photographed these before said, “This one was much larger than previous dumps I have seen.”

There are a number of reasons that a rocket may dump fuel, but the main one is after they don't need the fuel, such as when the main burn is done, they dump the excess to prevent the rocket from exploding while it remains in orbit or as it plunges back to earth.

The Zhuque-2 rocket or in space terms “orbital launch vehicle” was the first rocket to use methalox fuel to reach orbit. That happened on July 12, 2023. The version of the rocket that dumped fuel over the US was the newer Zhuque-2E. The fuel is becoming more popular with many government agencies and private space companies, and as reported by Ars Technica, NASA is building launch pads for methalox rockets on their properties and testing how big the explosions are when a launch goes wrong. It currently sounds like it is the fuel of the future.

When dumped, methalox freezes into clouds and those clouds can get illuminated by the sunlight. When that happens, there’s a display like the one that I witnessed and photographed. If you want to see one of these, watching the Chinese launch schedule might be helpful. But as this fuel becomes more popular, we will like see many more of these displays in space, especially if SpaceX switches completely to methalox. They are currently launching 1-3 rockets a week to put Starlink satellites into space, and the owner wants to have 10,000 AI satellites in space.

The over 10,300 Starlink satellites currently in orbit have already made it nearly impossible to take photo without a satellite. Before Starlink, there were only about 2,000 satellites in orbit. In Yale’s E360 newsletter, Jonathan MacDowell, scientist at Harvard and the Smithsonian, estimated that by 2040, there could be more than 100,000 satellites. That’s a lot of rocket launches to get that many up there.

The night sky is getting busy. I’m glad that I got to live during a time when it was rare to see a satellite passing overhead.

While I liked seeing this, I do wonder about what all these launches are going to do to our atmosphere. I found a good article from YaleEnvironment360 that covers this. I posted these photos on Facebook and I had to turn off the comments after it went viral to over 2,000,000 views. The comments got pretty bad.

Until next time

I’ll see you again in two weeks.

The parting shot is one of the photos I took as a demo for a two image blend.

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Somehow, what started as a throwaway joke took on weight and settled in my mind as a kind of warning. This year I arrive at that predicted age, and while I’ve avoided sailboats like the plague ever since, for the past several years I’ve been thinking about what will happen.

I know that must sound silly to most of you, but in a way, it has helped me come to terms with the idea that we all pass away. That’s not easy when you see family, friends, and acquaintances getting sick and passing away around you. Hitting home, there’s been another cancer diagnosis in my family, and a friend recently passed away. I’ve always mentally understood that this time in my life will come about, and people talk about when you get to a certain age, those around you get there too, and it’s only a matter of time before they start dropping around you.

But, here I am, and it’s still shocking.

I don’t know if I’ll die this year while sailing around the world. I don’t know if sailing means sailing or means paddling or means Lake Superior or means a raft or means on a river or means just living my life. Like making a photograph, it’s easy to assign meaning once you’re looking back at it, but harder to understand its meaning while taking it.

At any rate, I’ve been preparing. Many of my friends have bought big toys, had more adventures, and spent a lot of what they’ve earned. I’ve watched in envy and wondered if I would have done something similar had my circumstances been slightly different. But we had a kid, despite being later in life and learning it wasn’t likely. We had been preparing for a big bike trip, but with his birth, my mindset changed. If I was only going to live into my 50s, I needed to save money to help his future, and I’ve set everything aside.

Now, I’m here in this year. Statistically, I’m unlikely to die. A high school joke isn’t likely to kill me, but I feel like I need to make decisions about what to pass along.

I have around a thousand articles published online and in print that aren’t backed up on my hard drives. I’ve already lost hundreds of short stories, novels, and hundreds of poems on old, long-gone floppy disks. Even this essay is fragile—living only on Substack and in your inbox. It’s not printed, not saved for my son, or stored anywhere I control. It will likely disappear.

I have boxes and boxes of slides. During the last move, I lost all my black and white negatives—some I still wish I had. I have a digital image catalog nearing 250,000 images. There are thousands of great images in that catalog. But how do I pick what to preserve?

How do you choose what matters, knowing most of it won’t last anyway? It’s much easier to see what mattered later after everything else has fallen away.

Over that last decade or so, I’ve watched my dad scan old slides and photos and compile the family history. On my computer, I have several photos and a pdf of the family history that I haven’t read. In my closet somewhere, I have a giant roll of paper that my dad made documenting the family genealogy on one side of my family that goes back over 1,250 years.

That feels just as imaginary as the fortune teller.

I remember as a kid sitting on the back bedroom floor at my grandparents’ house, built on Asbury Street in Dubuque, Iowa, in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, in a section of town that my grandpa developed—he developed over a square mile of the town—with my cousin looking through an old shoe box of faded and corner-torn black and white photos. The musty smell of old photos long stored filled the air along with dust, and I wondered who they were. Even then, so close to their lives, they were lost to our memories.

That’s what this essay is. The six photos that I’ve included are like that musty shoe box full of black and white photos. These six are the ones that if I had to choose at this moment—today’s version of me—I’d pass along to my son to keep until he was an adult. To remember my work by.

But maybe that’s not the important part, because if I were to pass away this year, what I left behind isn’t in those photos. It’s how I raised him, the time we spent together, and what I tried to pass along through photography, through teaching, through being out there.

Ultimately, few of us will be remembered outside of our family and most of us will only be remembered by our children, grandchildren, and if lucky our great grandchildren. While the famous among us will be remembered longer, I know I’m not one of those. If somehow despite my best effort to not want a gravestone I end up with one, this is what I’d want it to read:

Bryan Hansel took a few photos, loved his family, and tried to live up to his ideals. He rests here until someone digs up the cemetery in pursuit of empty progress.

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Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this essay, and I’ll see you in two weeks. And if I am still around in 2027, I’ll be out there teaching. My 2027 photography workshops are open, and I’d be glad to have you along.

On April 16, 2026, Republicans sold out the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), one of my favorite places in the world, as a gift to a foreign mining company, and as Senator Martin Heinrich, one of the Senators who fought to keep the protections, said on the Senate floor, “to pad the pockets of the President's buddy from Chile.” The extracted minerals from this Chilean mine would be sent to China.

Before the Republicans voted to strip protections from the Boundary Waters, the forest and waters surrounding the BWCAW were protected from copper-sulfide mining. Despite bipartisan opposition, and undivided opposition from Minnesota’s Senate delegation, Republicans went forward with it using a tactic that bypassed the filibuster and that had never been used before to remove protections from our public land in this way.

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Republicans used the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which allows congress to object to a federal agency rule within 60 days. If their objection passes, and the president signs it, then the rule doesn’t go into effect and the federal agency can never propose a similar rule. A public land order, which is a power that Congress granted the executive, is not a rule. The current executive administration changed the definition of a public land order so that this public land order that protected the BWCAW would be considered a rule—whether or not this was legal is unknown.

In this case, the CRA was used against Public Land Order 7917, which is a 20-year withdrawal of land from copper-sulfide mining based on two years of studying the issue. The order was signed on January 26, 2023. That’s 3 years, 2 months, and 21 days before the CRA was used and well outside the 60 days limit imposed by the CRA. According to the CRA rules are required to be submitted to Congress, so Congress can decide if they want to use the CRA. Because public land orders are not rules, they were never submitted to Congress in the way required by the CRA. After the current executive administration declared this public land order a rule, they then submitted it to Congress. Whether or not this was legal is unknown, but unless there’s a lawsuit the effect is the same as being legal.

In the way the CRA was used, because it changed the definition of what a rule is, it not only puts other public land orders in jeopardy, it also puts in jeopardy logging projects, mining projects, and potentially any action taken by any federal agency taken in the last 30 years (and maybe longer). A future administration could change the definition of a rule based on precedent set by this administration. On the Senate floor, Minnesota Senator Tina Smith warned, “What goes around comes around.”

During debate on the bill, none of those who voted to strip the protections from the BWCAW listened to those Senators who debated in favor of keeping the Boundary Waters protected. When Senator Tina Smith, who spoke in favor of the protections, explained the science behind why the public land was protected, the opposition senators weren’t even in their senate seats to listen. They were missing.

Smith explained how the proposed mine in this area would only operate for a decade or maybe two but would create centuries of pollution. When the sulfide containing rock that the copper is contained within, in miniscule amounts, is dug up, pulverized, and exposed to water and air, it creates sulfuric acid, a highly corrosive acid. That eventually creates something called acid mine drainage, which is what happens when the acid leeches other toxic metals, such as arsenic and mercury, out of the waste rock. It devastates ecosystems, kills aquatic life, and contaminates water for centuries.

As Smith explained, in other water-rich areas where these mines have been allowed, the acid mine drainage has been shown to have traveled at least 100 miles through waterways. The proposed mine, in this case, would be under a popular lake just outside the Boundary Waters and across from family cabins. The water from that lake flows into the Boundary Waters, up to the international border, to Voyageurs National Park, into Canada and eventually to Hudson Bay. As the water takes the toxic mine drainage with it, it will irreparably harm the Boundary Waters and other waterways.

The drainage itself could last longer than the United States of America has been a country.

This pollution is what the Republican voted for.

We know it wasn’t the economy that they voted for, because an independent and peer reviewed study from Harvard showed that “more jobs and more income in the region are generated by protecting public lands near the Boundary Waters than by sulfide-ore copper mining.”1

After the vote, Senator Smith said, “Republicans privately told me that they knew this was wrong, and I wish they had voted with their conscience.”

What’s next?

If you’re wonder what’s next, you aren’t alone. While this is a devastating loss of protection for the Boundary Waters, it isn’t the end of the fight. There are many other paths to continue to fight against polluting the Boundary Waters. The goal is permanent protection. I'd suggest through a state constitutional amendment.

As a photographer, I’m going to continue sharing my images and working to get those images to organizations fighting for clean water and permanent protection of the Boundary Waters. I also feel that it is important to speak out about protecting public lands (see: Should Nature Photographers Speak Out?). I recently spoke about how Ansel Adams and other photographers used their images to help get places protected. You can listen to my conversation with Staci L Drouillard on WTIP’s Boundary Waters Podcast.

If you want to keep informed and be part of the community working to protect the Boundary Waters, you can join both the Friends of the Boundary Waters and Save the Boundary Waters.

Both do slightly different work. Friend of the Boundary Waters, now 50 years old, has been working to not only protect the Boundary Waters from copper-sulfide mining and other forms of pollution or issues, but also to help educate the public about the Boundary Waters. They have outdoor educators working in the gateway communities of Ely and Grand Marais. My 11-year-old has taken courses from their outdoor educator here in Grand Marais. They also offer trip planning and route resources on their website, and they have a great podcast that covers a wide range of recreational topics. Save the Boundary Waters focuses specifically on fighting the copper-sulfide mining issue and protecting the Boundary Waters from the pollution the proposed mine would cause.

My photography business is part of both of their business coalitions, and I donate to both. If you feel as passionate about our outdoor public spaces as I do, you can join either group as an individual or as a business.

I think that it’s important for outdoor photography to testify, and be used as a prophet to help protect what we have, and if what we have is lost, to show the future what was taken away from them and who did it. As Toni Morrison said, all art is political, and to pretend otherwise is to defend the status quo. I hope that you will start to see your photography in the same way.

Future generations depend on it.

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For the last month, I’ve been in the process of imagining what my 2027 should look like and then taking those ideas and putting them on the reality of a schedule. I find this time of year both rewarding and also nerve wrecking. It’s the latter because—and I know I say this every year when I do this annual post—it’s hard to believe that I’m scheduling my life over a year ahead of time. That’s especially true because I used to like to wing everything in my life and just figure it out when I got there.

Anyway, I decided that for 2027, I’m doing two destination workshops, and Grand Marais, MN will host the remaining.

I’m doing registration in two waves again this year. The first wave is for alumni and Facebook subscribers. The second wave is general registration.

Register here: Photo Workshop Schedule

• April 7, 12:01am: Alumni registration begins

• April 11, 12:01am: General registration begins

To get into the alumni registration, you will need a code. If you are an alumni, you will find the code in our alumni Facebook group. If you are a Facebook subscriber, you will find the code in our Facebook subscriber group. If you’re an alumni that doesn’t to Facebook, email me.

So, here are the 2027 workshops and why I decided to offer each. Even you aren’t interested in attending one of my workshops, these are locations and timings that you should consider in your own travels.

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Winter on Lake Superior | Jan 29–31

I love photographing Lake Superior during the winter. From Grand Marais, because the shore runs mainly east-west, the sunrise and sunset are over the lake. In the early parts of the winter, we get sea smoke, which is a fog that makes everything feel dreamy. The shore gets coated with ice. Later in the season, plates of ice hummock against the shore. It’s amazing.

Registration for everyone is now open on this workshop.

Spring in the Great Smoky Mountains | Apr 19–23

If I had to pick a national park that I love the most, it would be Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I first visited there when I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, and it was one of my favorite spots on the trail. I also love the spring there. I love to see the flowers coating the forest floor, the green moss along waterfalls and streams, and the colors of sunrise painted against ridgelines that stack against each other and go to the horizon.

I was thinking about skipping another year before I returned to this one, but multiple workshop alumni requested this one.

Waterfalls of the North Shore | Apr 30–May 2

Waterfalls are one of my favorite subjects, and the Grand Marais area has many. The photo below is from Cascade River State Park. During this workshop, we visit as many as we can. Some years, snow remains. Some years, it’s gone. There’s usually a high flow, and on the big years, you can feel the vibration of the water cascading down to Lake Superior as you stand next to the falls.

Milky Way Pano | May 6-8

Have you wanted to learn how to make a Milky Way panoramic photo? Then this workshop is for you. In spring, the Milky Way is low in the sky and stretches from the north to the south. I hadn’t planned on running this workshop again until 2028, but it’s back because multiple alumni requested it.

Flowers, Waterfalls & the Full Moon | Jun 16–20

I’ve offered flower photography classes, waterfall photography class, full moon photography classes, and flower and full moon photography classes, but I figured that I could try to top it all by combining three of my most favorite subjects into one workshop. The timing is perfect for spring flowers in the Grand Marais area, and we’ll get a couple of chances at the full moon, plus waterfalls are usually running at a low late spring or high early summer rate, which I find stunning.

Northern Night Skies | Jul 6–10

This is a classic photo workshop for me. It explores the night skies of Cook County, MN which is one of the darkest places in the world. We have a IDA Dark Sky Sanctuary in the county. On this workshop, we split our time between inland locations and Lake Superior. The locations are different from those on the next workshop.

Night Skies of the Gunflint Trail | Aug 1–5

The Gunflint Trail is home to one of the darkest spots in the world at a Bortle 1. It’s also home to streams, and lakes, and beautiful tree lines. If we’re lucky, we’ll see the northern lights. I remember one workshop where we arrived at the darkest spot on the trail during the twilight, and after a participant got out of his car he said something like, “I’ve never seen the night so dark and with so many stars.” And, it wasn’t even true night, yet.

Lake Superior Fall Color | Sep 29–Oct 3

If you’ve followed my work and writing for awhile, you have likely seen me write that I’m not a fan of photographing fall colors, but I do like photographing landscapes when covered with fall color. That’s what we do on this workshop. We visit overlooks, inland lakes, remote gravel roads that become a tunnel of fall color, and end up with amazing photos. Plus, the sunset and sunrise photos! I had a hard time picking one photo for this newsletter because I have so many. This one is from last year’s workshop.

Gales of November | Nov 5–7

This is one of my longest lasting workshops. I’ve been running this one for 20 years now, although I have started to run it every other year. It’s back in 2027. I plan it for the statistically stormiest weekend of the year, and then we get the weather that we get. Sometimes it’s great (stormy) and sometimes it sucks (sunny and clam), but we focus on nautical themes for the workshop, and hope for the best or is that the worst.

Early Winter in Badlands National Park | Dec 1–5

I used to run this workshop often, but then I replaced it with the Badlands and Black Hills Workshop. I was looking back at my old photos from 2019 and prior and saw how amazing the park was in December. I’m really looking forward to this one. I have so many good photos from the Badlands in December. And, it’s always so quiet there in December that we practically have the park to ourselves.

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Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this edition. If you’re interested in my workshops, please, sign up early and sign up often and sign up for all of them. I’ll see you again in two weeks with a new essay.

One late winter night, I ventured down a northern Minnesota road typically snowed in but just covered with a dusting of snow. I stopped at a creek that curved towards the north and the northern arm of the Milky Way. The night was one of those nights where the cold of late winter clears the sky, and the stars look so sharp that they feel like you could reach out and touch them.

The night descended upon the creek, and because it was so cold it built frost upon the creek’s ice, and the grasses in the wetlands surrounding the creek were dusted with snow that was coated with frost. Under the light of the stars, the frost sparkled. If you stared long enough, you could see the frost change color like the dog star Sirius flickering behind me.

It was the dead of night and night surrounded me.

When there are no streetlights, night feels like wearing onyx. It’s darker still when there’s limited light pollution and you’re in the countryside away from any small villages. There night looks like a piece of obsidian reflecting the flickers of a fire. It can be so dark that you can see, with your bare eyes, Andromeda, a neighboring galaxy.

To see our neighbor, you don’t need a telescope or binoculars. It’s there as a smudge in the sky. Visible. Hanging among the stars, next to the northern arm of the Milky Way which towers over your head. And so many stars that the brightest constellations – the only stars visible from a downtown big city such as St. Paul – disappear and fade away. Night there is so thick that it makes you feel solitude even when not alone.

But I was alone, and I left the warmth of my car, walked to a point where I could best set up a camera to capture the curve of the creek under the stars. I almost shivered as I placed the camera onto my tripod. It was obsidian dark, and I caught a view of Andromeda from the corner of my eye until I lost it.

Alone in the obsidian and onyx, the peacefulness of solitude descended from the sky. My thoughts disappeared. Just me and the new frost. Just me and the cold. Just me and our neighboring galaxy. Just the stars. I started to feel small under that vast winter sky. But not lonely. Never lonely. There were too many stars to accompany me on my journey. Just here. Just now. Just the night. Just the obsidian and the onyx and the flickering fire light of the stars warming the cold night.

With my camera on the tripod, I pulled out a flashlight to light up the view in front of me to make it easier to compose my photo. The light cast itself across the distant spruce and fir tree line, that backed the wetlands about 50 yards away, and caught two eyes for a second.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up as the wolf howled into the night. That howl echoed across the wetland, into the trees behind me. I glanced upward behind me in reaction to being surrounded and saw Sirius in the sky flickering at me to run. It was time for the chase, and I was the rabbit. My solitude broken.

The thing about solitude is that you are alone – maybe not as alone as I was under that night sky with a wolf just 50 yards away but alone. It’s the type of alone that is welcomed, and people apologize when they interrupt your solitude. It’s a time to reflect and to let everything go. It’s a quiet time that you set aside to recharge. There are other types of aloneness that contrast with solitude, such as isolation and seclusion. In the former, you feel separated from your peers, your friends, and your family, and you feel separated not by choice. It’s a banishment of sorts. When secluded, you shut off others and withdrawal physically from their presence. It is your choice.

Solitude doesn’t require being isolated or secluded. You can experience solitude while gathering with others. It can fall upon you suddenly or slowly. It can be like an increasing temperature that you fail to notice. One minute you are together with friends, and ten minutes later you realize that they are talking but you’ve been staring into a campfire full of stars. There have been times when I didn’t realize I was in solitude until interrupted.

And then there is the solitude of night.

Even when under all those stars and our neighboring sentient beings – there must be other beings – even when we are isolated from them, and even though we will never know them, we can join them in feeling quiet solitude. We can imagine that they are reflecting upon the night, the stars, the distance, and how truly small we are when compared to it all.

In joint solitude under the stars.

Just the stars. Just a howling wolf frosting the grasses, cracking the ice, echoing around off the trees behind and off the descending cold of a late winter night.

When alone at night, a wolf feels terrifying. And I was terrified. The wolf’s howl entered my ears, ran up and down my spine and interrupted my solitude. I returned to my thoughts and my thoughts said, run.

Leaving the camera behind, I dashed across the frost-covered wetland grasses, brushing the frost which dropped into the dark shadows covering the ground. I got to my car, now cold, and jumped in. My eyes glanced through the windows from side to side. To the tree line. Waiting to see eyes and a pack of wolves.

But nothing.

Nothing.

I was alone again.

I cautiously walked back to my camera. Each step crunched in the grass and each step broke the silence and my solitude. I didn’t feel like staying at this spot, and I packed up my gear and then returned to the car.

With a last glance at the tree line and up to the sky and to the flickering dog star, I wondered where the wolf had gone. Just before I got into the car I whispered to the wolf, “I’m sorry to have interrupted your solitude.”

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Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this essay. A little bit of housekeeping for those who have been waiting for my announcement. I’m working on my 2027 photography workshop schedule, and I plan to open registration on April 7th for alumni and April 11th for general registration. I didn’t have a Milky Way pano workshop on the calendar, but I’ve had a few people ask about that. If there’s enough interest, I’ll add it. Let me know if you were hoping that I would offer that again.

And now for the parting shot.

Years ago I read an essay by Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer in which he wrote that the power of photography lies partly in the repeatable print. Until his blog archives are back online, I haven’t been able to find the essay. I reached out to him, but he couldn’t remember it specifically. It likely referenced Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Lately, I’ve been considering the implications of Benjamin’s essay in light of AI-generated imagery and how AI imagery may make photography more culturally relevant than ever.

It’s hard to summarize Benjamin’s essay, but I’ll try. He begins with the idea that photography’s ability to reproduce itself perfectly as a print fundamentally changed art. For the first time, art could spread widely. Reproductions had existed before, but they lacked the uniqueness of the time and place in which the original work was created and displayed. Benjamin argued that photography shattered what he called the “aura” of traditional artwork and changed the relationship between the viewer and the art itself.

That relationship became democratized. Instead of being walled off in private or religious collections, art could be shared widely. This led, he argued, to the expectation that art should be widely seen. Photography and film also gained the power to guide interpretation through captions and context. They revealed things the eye couldn’t normally see (macro details, stopped action, and other visually hidden aspects of reality) expanding our understanding of the world.

Because images could now circulate widely, art through photography and film could also become political and even manipulative.

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When Images No Longer Have Originals

Even with all he argued, Benjamin missed that photography never fully destroyed the aura of traditional art because there was still an original negative (or now a digital file). Whether the original was a physical negative stored in archival sleeves or an original digital file that is seldom shared with viewers, the original remains protected and all the reproductions descend from it.

AI changes that.

With AI-generated imagery, there is no original art at all. Statistical models trained on millions of images generate new images through probability. Instead of producing a single unique original, they can create infinite variations.

If the reproducible print removed the scarcity of art in culture, AI explodes it. A great photographer might produce a hundred, or perhaps a thousand, images in a lifetime that could be considered their best work. AI can generate that many in a second.

Benjamin saw a shift from a ritual value of art to an exhibition value (art created to be widely seen). Now we have a generation value. Endless imagery has become the defining characteristic in an AI age. Choosing a single image now becomes more important than making one.

AI goes even further and raises a new question: who is the author at all?

In his essay, Benjamin suggests that modern media often blurred the line between the author and audience. With AI, anyone can generate an image on demand, so now those who were previously viewers of art can become a generator of imagery.

If art through photography could now become political and even manipulative, AI imagery raises the stakes. Endless convincingly fake images make it easier for political actors to manufacture propaganda and flood our media with false visual evidence.

Instead of revealing hidden details of the world that our eyes cannot see, AI generates hallucinations of the human culture’s memory. Where reproduction detached art through photography from the original, AI generation detaches images from reality itself. Images are no longer representations of the world. They have become outputs based on humanity’s visual past.

Photography’s New Aura

What I find interesting about the shift from traditional art to reproduceable art to AI imagery is that photography may gain back what it once helped to destroy.

In a tsunami of unlimited realistic imagery, photography develops a new kind of aura.

It shifts from unique styles or reproducibility towards evidence and its ability to prove where it was taken, when it was taken, that a real person witnessed the scene, and real light produced the photo.

As AI imagery becomes harder to detect the question becomes: can we verify that a photo is real? That will become harder with time, making the question increasingly unanswerable. But, that’s beside the point. It’s the desire to verify, the hunger for the real, that is worth noting. As certainty decreases, that hunger only grows. The new kind of aura depends less upon the ability to prove reality and more on the human need to experience it.

This, I think, will shift interest to the real-world experiences involved in making a photo. Viewers will want to know the story behind photo. They’ll want to know the location, the journey, the exploration and discovery, the weather, timing, and the human effort involved. Photos that required more effort may gain a higher value (evidenced by the increasing interest in film).

As someone who has spent twenty years leading photography workshops, I’ve already seen this shift. For many, the value of photography has moved from simply producing unique images towards the experience of making them.

When AI imagery is so easy to produce, photography will move even closer to the experience itself.

And, in the world of unlimited, convincing AI imagery that floods our media daily, curation also becomes more valuable. Choosing good photos, editing them well, presenting them consistently, and telling the stories behind them becomes as important of a creative act as taking the photo.

Navigating the swell becomes part of the art.

In this tsunami of imagery, photography gains a new type of aura. One based not on the rarity of the artwork, but in the scarcity of reality itself.

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Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this essay. I recently spoke briefly about AI-generated imagery on WTIP’s Boundary Waters Podcast. While it isn’t the majority of the podcast, if you want to listen you can listen to it here: Boundary Waters Podcast. I’ll see you again in two weeks.

Here’s the parting photo.

After more than a decade of being closed, the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore sea caves froze enough for them to open to winter travelers on February 17, 2026. Winds from the Mardi Gras Blizzard broke up the ice by the 19th, forcing the National Park Service to close the caves likely for the rest of the season.

I wanted to take advantage of the rare opportunity, so I made my way to the caves, leaving Grand Marais at about 4:30 a.m. and spending a little over two hours waiting in line for the bus from Cornucopia to Meyers Beach, where the hike to the caves begins. This was my second time visiting the caves in winter. This time involved a lot of waiting.

After I got back and read my social media posts from the Apostles, I had to laugh when a friend commented, “Man, I miss the old days when we had to use our best judgment on whether we should or should not bring a PFD along for the hike. No open/close, no parking or shuttle issues, you get the idea.”

That made me think back to the first time I visited in winter. It was in 2014, on the first day the caves opened. There were very few people on the ice. I parked at Meyers Beach in the early afternoon after stopping at the Village Inn for a bowl of their famous fish chowder, the best on Lake Superior. I didn’t reach the first ice cave until about 1 p.m. There wasn’t a rush, because it hadn’t yet exploded in everyone’s imagination. Hardly anyone was there.

That year, it was easy to get a photo without anyone in it. But I’ve always liked the one below with a fat bike in the shot. After that first day, the Park Service clarified their rules and fat bikes were no longer allowed on the ice, because the ice was considered a park trail or something along those lines.

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The best sport action I saw in the ice caves this year was an ice skater.

My first visit to the caves wasn’t on foot. It was by sea kayak, in 2009. I was paddling from Grand Marais, Minnesota, to Houghton–Hancock, Michigan, as part of a bigger trip. But I had injured my shoulder teaching rolling a week before I left. By the time I reached Houghton, I had given myself tendinitis from changing my paddle stroke and from not having enough strength in my shoulder; so much so that I couldn’t hold a rudder stroke on a two-foot following wave.

Photography wasn’t my goal on that trip, but I did make this photo. I was the only person along the entire shoreline on May 8 when I paddled through.

This year, there were so many people that it was difficult to make a photograph without someone in the frame. I waited about fifteen minutes to make a photo from the back of one cave, and then decided it wasn’t worth the wait anymore.

Instead, on this trip I focused on the ice formations.

It wasn’t the outcome I had envisioned when I was planning the visit, but the reality on the ground forced me to rethink my approach.

In the past, I had my pick of scenes and could photograph whatever I wanted with little to no waiting. This time, I wasn’t going to get what I wanted.

As an illustration, the next photo is one of my favorite images from 2014. The photo after that is the same spot this year.

Shifting my mindset, from what I wanted to what I was realistically going to get, took a little while. But eventually I adjusted, and came away with a few photographs I really like.

The hardest part was that just as I felt like I was finally settling into a rhythm, it was getting late in the day and the buses were scheduled to stop running. I had to hustle back to make sure I got a ride to the parking lot.

I had worked out a plan to return if the caves survived. I was going to come back on my cross-country skis, ski in the ditch along the highway, and then head out to the caves. That would have allowed me to stay on the ice until sunset without worrying about the bus schedule. And by then, I knew exactly how I wanted to photograph the formations, so it would have been a very productive visit.

It wasn’t meant to be.

Perhaps I need to find sandstone caves on land that form interesting ice shapes in a similar way to the Apostle Islands.

Now, I wait and hope that I get another chance to photograph the caves in winter in my lifetime.

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Until next time

Thanks for reading today’s essay. I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll see you again in two weeks.

I’ve had a few people reach out about registration for my 2027 workshops. If that’s something you’re interested in, I plan on finalizing the schedule soon and opening registration in April. There will be an early registration period for alumni and paid subscribers, followed by general registration. It’ll be similar to previous years.

The parting photo is from 2014.

I’m taking a small detour this week and sharing an older article I wrote for Ocean Paddler Magazine. It appeared in issue 74a, which I believe was the magazine’s final issue.

This was my 21st photography article for Ocean Paddler, part of a long-running series called Making the Shot. Over the years, I also wrote a separate series of navigation articles for the magazine—essentially a complete guide to sea kayak navigation—as well as another photography series.

At some point, I should probably gather all of those old articles into an ebook. Unfortunately, I’m missing a few issues of the magazine. If you happen to have PDF copies of older issues and are willing to share, I’d love to track down the ones I’m missing.

I’m including four of the original photographs from this article, as selected by the editor, along with the author credit that originally appeared at the end of every piece.

Making the Shot 21: Flow your own flow

After only a few hours of sleeping soundly in my sleeping bag, the alarm on my watch started to buzz. It was mid-summer and four am, an hour before sunrise. I slipped quietly out of my tent and past the tents of my friends. After moving several kayaks down near the water, the waiting game for the pinks, oranges, and yellows of dawn began.

While waiting and getting the composition and camera ready, time disappeared, thinking about the camera disappeared and I automatically placed a three-stop reverse ND grad filter into the filter holder on my camera. The grad would darken the sky and reduce the dynamic range between the bright sky and dark ground to allow the camera to capture a bright foreground without losing or blowing out the detail in the sky, but I didn’t think about that. I knew intuitively that the filter was the right one. I turned the camera’s front command dial without thinking to an aperture of f/11, which would give enough depth of field to have the kayaks and the background in focus.

Then I waited until the decisive moment and made the shot.

I was in a flow state – a state of being completely immersed and focused on the act of photography and experiencing the sunrise. While I can speak of the ‘I’ afterward, when in the flow there is no ‘I.’ Afterward, the state of flow is an indescribable state of being one and the same as the activity. There’s nothing else. There’s no ‘I’ – just making the photograph.

Throughout the years, the flow state has come often when photographing, kayaking or participating in other outdoor activities, and to a lesser extent when taking part in activities that seemly are boring. At first, it didn’t happen all that often, but the more it happened, the more common it became.

Early in my life, I decided to help cultivate the feeling. First, I started with the tasks that were simple but exceedingly boring, such as washing the dishes. For a few moments I’d get into a flow state and then my mind would start to wander, and I’d think about this, that and other things. Once I realized my mind wandered, I’d acknowledge that it wandered and bring my focus back to the task at hand. I eventually started to try this on everything I did. Sometimes, it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t. Eventually, though, it became natural to slip into a state of being where I was just doing what I was doing and not having my mind be somewhere else.

As that started to happen more often, I found that it became a more natural state and that when doing photography, the state allowed for more creative and imaginative compositions. When friends have observed me in those states, they always claim that everything looks so natural, so easy and how simple it looks for me to find a shot.

During my workshops, I’ve witnessed similar states in my students. After the initial classroom time and a couple of field sessions, students stop thinking about the techniques they’ve learned. Instead of having to worry about settings and composition techniques, they start to take those actions automatically and become immersed so deeply in photography that they become that action for a few moments.

During these flow states in students, I’ve seen epiphany or ‘a-ha moments’; the student suddenly understands something that has eluded them – often for years of workshops with me and other instructors.

It’s hard to say that it’s magic, but it reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Except, in this case, any sufficiently advanced state of mind feels like magic. While a tangent, it relates to kayaking through a Loren Eiseley quote, ‘if there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water’.

How do you cultivate this feeling and slip into it when you’re photographing? I wish I knew. As far as I can figure, you need to practice photography until you aren’t questioning your choices.

You should know what each camera setting does without having to consult a manual or book. Then you should practice being completely involved in the moment with whatever task you are performing. If you are mowing the lawn, concentrate on mowing the lawn. Feel what it’s like to do that. If you notice your mind wander, then think that it’s okay for your mind to do that before bringing your awareness back to mowing the lawn. Do the same when kayaking. Eventually, you may experience a flow state.

Once you experience a flow state, it’s easier for the next one to come. Like everything else in which practice improves your skills, practicing photography and practicing awareness of being in the moment will help lead to future flow states.

When you start to have flow states often, you’ll notice that your photography advances. To get there you have to flow your own flow.

About the author

Bryan Hansel is a freelance writer, award-winning photographer and a former American Canoe Association L4 Open Water Coastal Kayaking Instructor. His home port is on Lake Superior in Grand Marais, Minnesota.

Bryan blogs at www.paddlinglight.com and you can see his photography at www.bryanhansel.com.

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Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this small blast from the past. It’s been a bit of a trip for me to read it again after all these years.

I’ll see you again in two weeks.

Lately, I’ve been reading Emily Dickinson for another project that I’m working on (see: Weather From the Hill), and her It sifts from Leaden Sieves struck me as a perfect winter poem. I read it as a meditation on how democratic winter snow can be. It covers everything and nothing, no matter how regal, mountains included, is spared. Because it is so beautiful, it equalizes everything. Even a simple fence post becomes as elegant as royalty when wrapped in snow.

In photography, it’s much the same. Snow simplifies details and removes them from our view, no matter how visually elevated they once were, and no matter how unphotogenic they may have been before the storm. When snow remains unbroken, it makes almost any scene feel pure.

Even when I walk on fresh snow, I feel hesitant to break its surface, to disturb the illusion that everything is equal and untouched. Beneath that surface, we know chaos thrives. And chaos makes for terrible photos.

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So I tiptoe along, afraid to leave a mark and disturb an area that might later become a part of a photo. I cringe at every step, because once the illusion is shattered, there’s no returning until the next storm.

Pure snow doesn’t last long. Once it’s soiled, not even the most royal morning light, in what we assume is its golden power, can make a repair.

Here is Dickinson’s poem in its entirety.

It sifts from Leaden Sieves -
It powders all the Wood.
It fills with Alabaster Wool
The Wrinkles of the Road -

It makes an Even Face
Of Mountain, and of Plain -
Unbroken Forehead from the East
Unto the East again -

It reaches to the Fence -
It wraps it Rail by Rail
Till it is lost in Fleeces -
It deals Celestial Vail

To Stump, and Stack - and Stem -
A Summer’s empty Room -
Acres of Joints, where Harvests were,
Recordless, but for them -

It Ruffles Wrists of Posts
As Ankles of a Queen -
Then stills its Artisans - like Ghosts -
Denying they have been -

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Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this essay. I’ll see you again in two weeks.

One more thing before I go: on Monday, January 26, I’m offering an online course on how to use the photo planning app PhotoPills. The class is 1.5 hours long and held via Zoom.

You can sign up here: https://www.bryanhansel.com/shop/master-photopills-online-class/

On January 1st, 2018, I got up a little late and decided to shoot sunrise about 15 minutes from my house at Artist’s Point in Grand Marais, Minnesota. I messed around with a few different compositions and settled on a vertical shot of a small crack in the basalt that led directly to the sunrise. I made a bunch of frames, went home, picked my favorite, posted it, and didn’t think much more about it.

On January 1st, 2019, I got up a little late again and went back to Artist’s Point. I tried something different, decided it wasn’t working, and ended up shooting the same spot I had the year before. Because why not.

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On January 1st, 2020, I figured I might as well just shoot the same spot again. I set up the composition, kicked back, and watched the sun rise.

By the next year, I realized I probably had a project. I went back. I got skunked for sunrise, but now I was four years into it.

Between then and now, I’ve been getting up early and going to the same spot, trying to arrive before anyone can stand in my way. It’s been cold and a little unmotivating to stand in the dark for an hour before sunrise, but I’ve kept at it.

I’ve kept at it because it’s a project and it’s what you do for projects. Even when you feel like sleeping in or leaving the county to visit family, there’s this project that must be finished. So, every morning on the first of the year, I return to the same spot and take the same photo.

I’m now nine years into it.

Along the way, another artist showed up. He wets sheets of plastic and freezes them so they stand upright, and a travel writer has started showing up too. I only see her once a year, except on social media, so it’s always fun to say hi.

It’s nearly a decade-long project, and I have nine photos to show for it. That feels like so few photos. But at the same time, it feels like a very long time to take the same photograph. There’s something about the repetition of it, and the nice comfort of not having to think about what I’m going to shoot on the first of the year, that makes this project feel nice. It’s now like a ritual that I return to each year. I wake up, I drive to town, I walk to the point, I stand there for an hour, I say hi to my sunrise friend, I take a photo, and I head home.

It’s like daily life, but extended to a year, and it repeats like the sunrise every day and the winter every year and even though it starts my year it completes it, too.

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Until next time

I don’t have anything to plug this week, so I’ll finish with my normal, I hope that you enjoyed this essay, and I’ll see you again in two weeks.

Each year, I look back across all the images I made and select a single favorite photo from each month. It’s an exercise that helps me grow as a photographer—not by judging what I did “best,” but by paying attention to what I actually enjoyed making. More than anything, it helps me redirect my energy in the coming year toward the kinds of photographs that resonate with me personally.

I’ve written about this process before (and I also give a presentation on it to clubs). I’ve found that selecting your favorite photos at the end of the year can help you identify your style, and, more importantly, continue to develop it.

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What is style?

I like to keep things simple. To me, photographic style is photographing the subjects you like to photograph in the way you like to photograph them. It doesn’t have to be unique or original if it satisfies a few basic criteria.

A strong style is one that:

• Satisfies your own expressive vision

• Evokes an emotional response in you

• Changes as you change, growing alongside your interests

• Evokes emotional responses from others

Style isn’t something that remains static. It’s something that evolves as you pay attention to what matters to you.

How selecting favorites helps develop your style

Selecting your favorite photos helps reveal what kinds of images truly resonate with you. These favorites may not be your “best” photos. They may even fall outside what you think of as your current style. That distinction is important because it will help you identify which direction you want your style to go.

The process is at the end of each year take time to look back over all the photos you took and select your favorites (one from each month, or simply twelve from the year).

Once you’ve assembled your favorites look at them together. Are there patterns? Similar light, subjects, moods, or reasons they became favorites? Those answers can point directly toward what you might want to explore next.

After you identify those patterns, you can decide what to lean into during the coming year. Leaning into those patterns helps create or grow your style. If you don't think you have a style currently, then chasing your favorites and the patterns that you found can help you develop a style.

Analyzing my favorite photos

When I look across my images from this year, a few don’t resonate as strongly as the others. Those are April and June. In both months, I didn’t shoot much. While I love April’s image from the Smoky Mountains, it’s a photograph I’ve made before under similar conditions. The June image is one I like, but macro photography hasn’t been clicking with me lately. I set both of those aside as I continued my analysis.

Another image that stands apart is the night sky photo from May. I made it using a two-image blending technique I’ve been refining over the past couple of years. The goal of that technique is simplicity: creating sharp foregrounds and compelling skies in a way that’s easy to teach and easy for workshop participants to succeed with. I feel good about where that process is now, and I’ll continue teaching it in 2026. Stylistically, though, it closely resembles one of my favorite images from 2021, which suggests continuity rather than change.

The remaining images share some clear characteristics. Nearly all feature dynamic skies and strong side light. Two are photographed directly into the sun, which has long been my typical sunrise and sunset approach. The others are made with the sun just out of frame or well away from the horizon.

That’s interesting to me, because over the past year I’ve noticed myself enjoying photographs where the sun isn’t in the frame. Looking back, my favorite images from 2024 included eight sunrise or sunset photographs, nearly all shot directly into the sun. The one exception was made in December 2024. I can trace this shift in interest back at least that far.

What does that mean?

It means that in 2026, I want to spend more time looking for photographs with dynamic skies and strong side light, while keeping the sun out of the frame unless the light and clouds demand otherwise. That feels like a clear and natural direction to explore.

Maybe it will stick. Maybe it won’t. That uncertainty is part of the point.

Early in 2025, I struggled with photography because I felt like I wasn’t growing or changing. It wasn’t that I ran out of ideas. I had plenty, and I tried a few projects to push myself, but they felt forced and didn’t connect. I felt like I was chasing growth instead of just letting it happen.

That’s a frustrating place to be, especially after years of feeling engaged and curious. It made photography feel more like work than exploration and discovery.

What changed wasn’t that I needed a new technique or a bold new project. What changed was that I wasn’t paying attention to the photographs I kept returning to; the images that stayed with me as favorites throughout the year. Those favorites offer a new direction to follow, one that feels organic.

Now I have a direction that comes directly from the photographs I enjoyed making most in 2025. That feels like a more honest path to follow and a more interesting direction to chase.

I hope you’ll try this exercise yourself. Assemble your favorite photos and ask: What do these images say about what I enjoy photographing? If you do, I’d love to hear what you discover.

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Until next time

I hope you’ll spend a little time with these favorite photographs, and I see you again in two weeks.

p.s. I had a cancellation on my Bayfield Peninsula Photography Workshop – Seascapes, Landscapes & Lake Superior, running May 28–31, 2026. There’s one space open.

Winter arrived in northern Minnesota, and it’s awesome.

This morning it was -14°F. Recent mornings have often been below zero. Normal average temperatures for this time of year are 29°F for highs and 16°F for lows. I know most people don’t like these kinds of temperatures, but I love them. They create sea smoke on Lake Superior, and they turn the colors of winter soft and dreamy.

When the shoreline is coated with ice and snow and sea smoke rises from the open water, the subtle colors shift into shades of pastel. Waves wash against basalt and stone beaches, and Lake Superior becomes world-class for winter photography. As a bonus, from Grand Marais the sun rises and sets over the lake this time of year, giving us two chances every day to photograph winter light.

This year, early-season sub-zero temperatures combined with wind and wave directions aimed straight at the North Shore have coated shoreline plants in ice. Walking along the shore with crampons on feels like moving through an icy forest—every stem and branch frozen in place. It’s a winter wonderland, and the scenes you encounter tend to stop you in your tracks and keep your eyes on a photograph longer than you expect.

The hardest part of this kind of photography is getting a frozen subject to stand out from the uniform whiteness of snow. If the subject isn’t already glowing in sunlight, like in the photo above, a little work in the darkroom can make all the difference.

First, use an object selection or brush to select your frozen subject. Slightly warm it and nudge the white balance tint toward magenta to counter any green glow that can creep in. Make it just a touch brighter.

Second, select the snowy background (Lightroom Classic’s landscape masking tool usually does a good job with snow). Cool it slightly with the temperature slider and consider lowering the exposure or highlights just a bit. Trust what looks natural to your eye. These small adjustments help the subject pop off the snow, like in the photo below.

Here’s a before-and-after comparison.

One lesson I learned long ago is that ice formations like these don’t last very long. It pays to get out early and photograph them while you can. While they’re around, you never know what you’ll find. Mundane summer scenes can be instantly transformed, as in the photo below.

But, by the time most people notice these scenes, they’re already gone.

Winter doesn’t wait. A good photographer won’t either.

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Until next time

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed this newsletter and get a chance to enjoy winter while it lasts. And if you’d like a reminder of these moments on your wall all year, my calendars are a good place to start.

Here’s the parting photo.

As I write this, it’s Black Friday—about two hours before the annual Black Friday fireworks over the Grand Marais harbor. Here in town, they like to call today Oh Ole Day, which is a cute name for a celebration that’s really trying to put more heads in hotel beds. After all, you’ve got to get your business into the black this weekend. Heck, I’m even trying, with 30% off my Northern Minnesota 2026 Calendar and my Dreams of Iowa 2026 Calendar when you use the code NORTHERN30. (Get them here: https://www.bryanhansel.com/out/calendar/).

So when I sat down to write this week’s newsletter, all I could think about was black.

Black.

Black.

And black.

I did a quick image search for “black” in my catalog, and the biggest return? The Black Hills.

If that isn’t a little too on-the-nose, there’s Devils Tower—also in the Black Hills—photographed at night in silhouette. Silhouettes are black, after all, though with the high dynamic range of digital cameras they’re not as common as they used to be. The tower’s English name is a mistranslation of Mato Tipila in Lakota, or Bear Lodge, which means even the name has a bit of darkness to it. And, of course, a bear, furry black, uses its lodge in the darkest months of winter.

Then up popped Black Beach, the one made of mining waste dumped into Lake Superior at Silver Bay. If the courts hadn’t stepped in, we’d probably still be seeing that waste slide into the big lake. That waste turned into a beach that’s black and photogenic.

The opening photo comes from Black Beach, but favorite photo from there is of the Upside Down Cedar—partly because it shows the black beach with waves washing up it, and partly because it feels like some kind of black art to grow a tree upside down.

And then there’s black and white photography. My favorite black-and-white image comes from a lake in a currently roadless area near the Boundary Waters. The current administration is likely going to end that roadless protection and open the area to new roads, logging, and development. That feels dark—like watching something good fade to…

Black.

We could double or triple down on black and white, the Black Hills, and Devils Tower.

But black could also be a train under the black of night.

Or maybe a loon…

And am I the only one who thinks things get a little loony on Black Friday? This year, Black Friday seems to have turned into Black October, Black November, and will probably keep going through Cyber Monday, Black December, and then resume again after Christmas. You have to wonder if the deals are really deals. The camera I’ve been eyeing dropped back to its pre-tariff sale price after rising by $200 post-tariff. If they can drop it that far today, why not before? It all feels a little black to me.

Black.

Black.

Black.

Anyway, from the darkness of Black Friday, here are some fireworks to light things up. Happy Oh Ole Day, everyone!

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Until next time

I hope you enjoyed this exploration of black. I’ll see you again in two weeks.

Meanwhile, buy my calendars because it’s Black Friday and they are on sale until December 2. And I had a cancellation on my Badlands and Black Hills Photo Workshop, so there’s one spot open if you’ve been thinking about joining me there.