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Blue Whale Icons Underwater Life Underwater Photography

Blue Whale Full Body Photo

Blue Whale Full Body Photo For more, see Blue Whale Photos, Balaenoptera musculus I made my first underwater photo of a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) about 18 years ago, and over the intervening years I have struggled to make a perfect image of an entire blue whale, rostrum to fluke,…

Phil CollaJanuary 29, 2015

White Mountains

Ancient Bristlecone Pine Trees and the Night Sky Milky Way

If you like this, please see my Gallery of Ancient Bristlecone Pine Tree Photos or my Gallery of Milky Way Photos. These ancient bristlecones are two of the more iconic in the world. They stand on a slope in the White Mountains in a clearing with few other trees nearby.…

Phil CollaAugust 6, 2014

Canyonlands The American Southwest Utah

Mesa Arch Sunrise and Night under the Milky Way, Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Icon alert: this post is about Mesa Arch, a major icon which many now scorn and avoid as a subject of landscape photography, and which is known to have the crowd these days. I've photographed a few icons over the past 30 years, although many of them are underwater and…

Phil CollaJune 7, 2014

Arches Icons The American Southwest Utah

Icon: Sunset over Delicate Arch, Arches National Park, Utah

I unapologetically photograph a lot of icons and Delicate Arch is one of my favorites. There are few places in the United States that are more iconic than Delicate Arch in Arches National Park -- it is depicted on a license plate for crying out loud. Places like this are…

Phil CollaJune 1, 2014

Icons Paris

River Seine, Full Moon and Eiffel Tower at Night, Paris

River Seine, Full Moon and Eiffel Tower at Night, Paris We walked along the Right Bank of the Seine from our small hotel on Ile Saint Louis to the Trocadero. For about 5 minutes at the top of the hour the Eiffel Tower lit up with a nice display of…

Phil CollaFebruary 5, 2013

Surf

Newport Surf Photos

I tested out my latest Del Mar Surf Housing this morning. I had great light for about 20 minutes right at sunrise, then swam around for a few hours trying to photograph the set waves. I wish I was about 20 years younger, I feel pretty worked over. Thanks for…

Phil CollaAugust 18, 2012

Icons Wisdom

The World’s Greatest Photo Subjects

The World's Greatest Photo Subjects. I'm going big with this blog entry! After 20 years of making photographs, I realized I have had the good fortune of seeing some of Earth's greatest natural history spectacles with my own eyes. I looked back and made a list of eleven of the…

Phil CollaJune 8, 2012

Astrophotography and Night Scapes Icons Joshua Tree

Heavenly Arch on EarthShots

I made a spur-of-the-moment trip with Garry McCarthy to do some night-time photography. We were pretty sleep-deprived by the time we were done, jacked up on coffee and then having to drive several hours home as the sun was just rising, but I managed to make four or five images…

Phil CollaJune 4, 2011

Hawaii Humpback Whale Icons Ocean Realm

Heat Run: Humpback Whale Behavior Photos

Humpback whale underwater photography. Originally titled "Heat Run", this appeared in Ocean Realm Magazine in April 1995, the first of a series of articles I authored for Ocean Realm in the '90s. This blog post is now available as a downloadable PDF article. Each winter North Pacific humpback whales (Megaptera…

Phil CollaNovember 1, 2009

Great White Shark Guadalupe Island Icons Mexico Sharks

Great White Shark Photos

This great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) was photographed at Guadalupe Island, Mexico. I think I have made about 15 trips to the island, a mix of open-water diving trips and shark cage photography trips. I am hoping to get down there again for scuba diving, freediving and just plain exploration…

Phil CollaApril 22, 2009

California Icons Infrared Landscape National Parks Sierra Nevada Yosemite

Infrared Photo of Yosemite Falls and Leidig Meadow

I used the same digital infrared camera to photograph Leidig Meadow with upper Yosemite Falls. The skies were totally socked in, there was light rain and virtually no color, so normal color photographs were unappealing and immediately deleted. But a black and white conversion of one of the color channels…

Phil CollaApril 14, 2009

Alaska Bald Eagle Icons

Bald Eagle Landing, Alaska

See the new bald eagle photos. A large group of bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) was gathered on the snow-covered ground when periodically another eagle would arrive, in flight, and join the group by skimming just over their heads, slowing with wings outstretched, finding a suitable spot amid the crush, and…

Phil CollaApril 5, 2009

Egypt Icons Photo of the Day

Photo of the Egyptian Pyramids

We wrapped up our stay in Egypt with some time at my brother's house in Cairo, touring the older parts of the city and seeing some off-the-beaten-path markets, mosques, and other amazing stuff. One highlight of our time in Cairo was a day at the Giza necropololis to see the…

Phil CollaMay 20, 2007

California Icons Trees White Mountains

Photos of Ancient Bristlecone Pine Trees

Ancient Bristlecone pine trees (Pinus longaeva) live in a relatively restricted area of eastern California, Nevada and Utah, typically at altitudes above 9500'. The ancient bristlecone pine tree is considered to be the world's oldest species of tree (and indeed the world's oldest sexually reproducing, nonclonal lifeform). A number of…

Phil CollaOctober 8, 2006

Galapagos Diaries Icons Underwater Life

Whale Shark Photo, Darwin Island, Galapagos

The Galapagos Islands, an Ecuadorian archipelago straddling the equator in the Eastern Pacific, is a remarkable underwater paradise. The central and southern islands hold a wealth of temperate as well as tropical marine creatures due to the mixing of currents there. However, it is the northern islands of Darwin and…

Phil CollaJune 22, 2005

Icons New York

Photo of the Brooklyn Bridge, New York City

Just returned from a week in New York City. We had a chance to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and view the Manhattan waterfront from the elevated perspective of the bridge, through its many cables. Here are a few photos from our walk: Brooklyn Bridge cables and tower.Image ID: 11070Location:…

Phil CollaApril 12, 2005

Icons National Parks Wyoming Yellowstone

Photo of Old Faithful Geyser, Yellowstone National Park

Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park is such an icon that photos of it have become cliche. It is the most accessible and watched of all the geysers in the park. However, it is still a wonderful sight to behold regardless of how many people have seen it before…

Phil CollaMarch 10, 2005