Posts primarily focused on the topic of photography.
Favorite photos and videos.
Wow, 2025 was quite the year. With a dozen or more hikes in New Hampshire, and travels to Australia, England, Greenland, Iceland, New Zealand, Colorado, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and South Carolina, I had many opportunities for photography. Check out some of my favorite photos!
After dark, London provides many photo opportunities.
Nearly every day, I walk past the London theater (um, sorry, theatre) housing a production of the blockbuster Broadway show, Wicked. It’s after dark, when the show is running, that it truly shines. Literally. The bright-green neon lights of the Apollo Victoria theatre’s marquee illuminates the street and, what I love most, the queue of taxis waiting out front.
Three days in Smoky Mountains National Park, and Cherokee NC.
After wrapping up a week-long photography workshop in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, I headed southwest for a solo weekend in the foothills of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Based in the town of Cherokee – in the heart of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation – I had more time to explore waterfalls, fall foliage, ridgetop overlooks, and beautiful hiking trails.
I have hundreds of photos to sift through; for now I’ll share just a few. Read on!
Continue reading “Smoky Mountains”A week in the Blue Ridge, photographing waterfalls at the peak of fall foliage.
I had the pleasure of spending a week in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, with five other aspiring photographers attending a Muench Photography Workshop led by the incomparable Talor Stone. We had gorgeous fall foliage, incredible waterfalls, and fantastic weather. It was pure joy to share a week with a group of other people thoroughly focused on photography, all happy to spend hours standing in the shallows below a waterfall exploring every angle, every exposure, refining our technique and learning new skills. Folks who are happy to rise every day before sunrise, driving up dark, windy roads and hiking to mountaintop outlooks to capture the special light at ‘blue hour’ before sunrise and ‘golden hour’ just after. My kind of people!
With a link to a complete gallery.
Ok, that’s the end of a series of posts about my week in Iceland, including visits to Diamond Beach and its two nearby glaciers, and eleven waterfalls:
Continue reading “Iceland wrap-up”An endless field of black-eyed susans.
Not far down the road from my home is a luscious meadow, a former farm pasture that the owner has preserved via a conservation easement to the Upper Valley Land Trust. This meadow is popular with local deer, turkeys, and other wildlife. In recent years, the conservators have planted the roadside with wildflowers, allowing me a brilliant commute on summer mornings. Last year, I shared photos of the multicolor feast of wildflowers. This year, the field is carpeted with the yellow and orange tones of Black-Eyed Susan flowers. Today, a mildly foggy morning provide just the right atmosphere for photographs. Click through the gallery!
Favorite photos and videos.
Wow, 2024 was quite the year. With a dozen or more hikes in New Hampshire, and travels to Finland, Estonia, Iceland, Switzerland, Japan, Korea, California, South Carolina, and India, I had many opportunities for photography. Check out some of my favorite photos!
Christmas on Kiawah Island – and wildlife photography.
We spend nearly every Christmas on Kiawah Island, South Carolina. One of the “sea islands” that form a chain of barrier islands near Charleston, Kiawah is heavily developed with vacation homes and golf courses… but is also carefully managed for green spaces and wildlife. As a result, it is a beautiful place to explore and to photograph wildlife. I enjoyed the perching birds (hawk, osprey, herons) and the shorebirds. But… read on!
Continue reading “Kiawah Island, SC”Partial eclipse of a harvest ‘supermoon’.
Last night we arrived home from almost three weeks of international travel just minutes before the beginning of a lunar ‘supermoon’ eclipse. The cloudless sky was dark and the moon had just risen over the hill to our east, bright and full. I quickly reconfigured my camera from our travels through sunny Japanese gardens into settings suitable for photographing the full moon, and captured a few shots as the partial eclipse began, and then peaked at 10:44 EDT. Below is a photo during peak, when the top of the moon was darkened by earth’s shadow.
It was a calm, cool evening, and I stood in the driveway for about twenty minutes enjoying the growing eclipse. While I watched, I listened to the local coyote family howling at the moon, somewhere on the far side of the hill. Closer at hand, in the shadows to my south, I heard the alarm call of a white-tailed deer: a high-pitched snort while leaping away from an imagined predator. Meanwhile my cat, Sebastian, wove his way lazily around my ankles, equally happy to be spending an evening in the moonlight.
See the gallery of three photos – at full resolution, you can see even more detail.
A beautiful two days in the remote northwestern region of Iceland.
After a few days amongst throngs of tourists at the “Golden Circle” of sights near Reyjavik (see my prior post) we headed for the remote northwestern corner of Iceland, the Westfjords. We rented a rural house at the blue dot on the map below, and explored westerly from there – reaching the westernmost tip of Iceland, which is also the westernmost point in Europe. It required driving some remote, dusty, narrow, twisty, and sketchy roads… but also led us to stunningly beautiful landscapes. Read on! and check out the galleries linked below.
David Kotz 