“Spade, we've got a 4,000-plus tree with the center present!” shouted Edmund Schulman to his colleague M.E. Cooley. Schulman, a dendrochronologist at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, had spent two decades conducting field work as part of his search for the world’s oldest trees. His pursuit had brought him to the remote White Mountains of California, home of several groves of Great Basin Bristlecone Pines.

After my Death Valley detour in April’s blog, I wanted to visit the park again to photograph Lake Manly before it disappeared for good. I returned to the park in early March as the weather started to warm up.

Hello everyone, it has been a few months since my last blog post. After much consideration, I have decided to quit landscape photography. After playing around with AI image generators, I realized that artificial neural networks yield much more rewarding photos than those that I get after a day in the field. I honestly do not see any point in going outdoors when I can find the perfect combination of weather conditions right on my computer screen. In the meantime, I will sell all my hiking and photography gear on eBay for ten dollars. I’ll post the eBay listing here shortly.

For most of the last three years, all my published landscape photography work has been shot on film. That all changed a few months ago, when I finally turned back to the “dark side” and bought a digital camera again—a lightly used Nikon Z7.

I started 2023 with grand ideas for the types of backpacking trips I wanted to do in the upcoming year. As I entered my third year of backpacking, I envisioned embarking on long, multi-day hikes deep into the Sierra backcountry. At the time, I predicted an average or below-average winter’s worth of snowfall, as had been the norm for the past few years. With that in mind, I booked multiple backpacking permits six months ahead of time, all spaced out throughout June and July. This way, I would have several trails from which to choose when summer came. Nature had other plans.

“There it is. Take it!” yelled William Mulholland as a torrent of water rushed down the Los Angeles Aqueduct to the roar of cannon fire and cheers from a crowd of 30,000. The 58-year-old self-taught civil engineer and head of the city’s water department had spent most of the past decade overseeing the construction of the 233-mile-long waterway, a feat of engineering contemporaries compared to the building of the Panama Canal. The aqueduct brought water from the Owens River, at the base of California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range. Mulholland’s singular vision of securing a water supply for the growing city of Los Angeles had finally come to fruition.

With much of the Sierra Nevada buried under hundreds of inches of snow after a record-breaking winter, I decided to make it my mission to explore every corner of the Bay Area in four weeks.

Back in January, I looked back at my work from 2022 and reflected on the past year. I felt deeply satisfied by the body of work I had created and thought I had honed in on my artistic style. At this rate, I thought, 2023 is going to be a banner year. It can only get better from here, right? Instead, the new year brought along a healthy dose of humility.

Ben Horne is a nature and landscape photographer based out of San Diego, California. His work, shot primarily on large format film cameras, showcases the natural beauty of the American Southwest. Ben has also been active on YouTube for over a decade, producing video journals of his various trips to Death Valley, Zion National Park, and other wilderness areas. I recently had the privilege of meeting and chatting with him on a video call. We discussed his introduction into photography, the satisfaction of making repeated visits to familiar locations, the ethics of photo editing, and much more.

I don’t know about you, but I get nervous inviting people to my house. I worry about how clean the floors are or whether I’ll have enough drinks for everyone. I also feel the same way about introducing friends to places I enjoy visiting.

I have written before about how much I love Yosemite and the Eastern Sierra and how I’ve visited those places so many times that they have become a second home for me. I have seen and photographed these places in some truly spectacular conditions. Last December, I had the opportunity to introduce some friends to those two areas.

The calendar not only shows a selection of my best work, it also embodies the lessons I’ve learned in the past year. I truly understood the value of returning to places I had visited before. Not only did several photos in this year’s calendar come from locations I had photographed previously, two of them even feature scenes that appeared in last year’s calendar. It goes to show both how perceptions of our “best” work change with time and how we can find inspiration in familiar locations. This has been most evident in my photos from the Sierra Nevada. My countless visits throughout the past year have allowed me to be in the right places at the right times for those lucky moments when beautiful scenery coincides with good light.

The range of elevations in the Sierra, from 10,000+ feet down to 4,000, means that autumn comes at different times for different places. Leaves might begin to turn at 10,000 feet in late-September, even as trees at 8,000 feet stay bright green for another two to three weeks. For that reason, I knew I could not time a trip to perfectly coincide with peak color in all the areas I wanted to visit. Instead, I decided on a middle ground: I would visit twice. I scheduled trips for the first and second weekends of October, knowing that I could find fall color at different elevations on each trip.

When I received the film back, I figuratively jumped for joy when I saw that the exposure had turned out perfectly. But my excitement diminished when I noticed one small detail which had escaped my attention: those stray blades of grass had made it into every single shot, and they lingered in the bottom righthand corner of the picture, taunting me for my inattention to detail.

This past summer, a few friends regularly asked me about weekend plans, to which I invariably replied with some version of, “Oh, I’m visiting the Sierra.” I often got quizzical looks, followed by a familiar refrain: “Wait…again? Didn’t you just go?” I often answered my friends’ question by saying that the scenery looked different on every visit and my enjoyment increased as I became more familiar with the area. However, I realized the difficulty of conveying that by words alone. I want to share two examples from this past summer of how photography helped me find and see an extraordinary landscape.

I plunged waist deep into the snow; the feeling of cold shock washed over me as my heart skipped several beats. As I came to my senses, I pondered each of my options. I patted the snow around me and sighed when I realized it was far too soft to fully support my weight if I attempted to climb out. I gingerly laid my trekking poles on the surface and carefully leaned forward to pull myself out.

In last month’s article, I documented an instance in which I bit off more than I could chew when it came to hiking a trail. That theme continues this month. My Memorial Day backpacking trip into Kings Canyon National Park turned into a comedy of errors.

I’m a bit of a Yosemite addict. I first visited the park as a kid, and I was immediately hooked. In 2021, I made a whopping total of ten visits to the park. It might surprise you to learn that I had never visited the park in the spring. That is, until April. I had always wanted to visit in springtime, but for one reason or another I never found the chance to do so. A few factors finally compelled me to make the trip. My friend Blake Johnston, who lives and works in the park, kept me updated on the state of the dogwood blooms in the valley, and encouraged me to visit. He also generously gifted me a huge batch of expired Velvia 50 from the mid-2000s, and I wanted to test out a roll or two in a familiar location and see the results. I decided to go for it. I scheduled a weekend trip in late April. I had several objectives in mind…

If you know me, you’ll know that I love shooting slide, or transparency film. I enjoy the vivid colors, which work well for the landscape scenes that I tend to photograph. Specifically, I have been a very consistent user of Fujifilm transparency films, Velvia 50 and Provia 100F. I would reckon that eighty to ninety percent of my recent work has been made on one of those two film stocks.

Velvia is the photographic equivalent of a Nicolas Cage movie. At its worst, it can leave a lot to be desired, but when it’s good, it’s really, really good. What do I mean by that? Velvia…

Welcome to my blog! Here I’ll be writing about the stories behind certain photos, recapping trips, or sharing my thoughts about photography-related issues. I’m hoping to make this a regular occurrence. If you enjoy reading this, please consider signing up for the email list. I’ll be sending notifications whenever I upload a new post.