location

Yudanaka Onsen is a small mountain town known in Japan for two things: its hot spring and the snow monkey park. There are many hot springs in the Yamanouchi area where Yudanaka is, including the more known Yudanaka Onsen and Shibu Onsen. The Japanese have been enjoying the water from these hot springs for centuries in bath houses. Shibu Onsen has 9 public bath houses (each with its figurine in front) and countless of private ones. The monkeys are the emblem of the area. Monkeys are drawn everywhere: on signs, on hotel logos, even on the manholes for the hot spring water pipes. We were looking for a Japanese style hotel called ryokan for our stay. The best roykan in town is the Kokuya, the hotel is literally on the hot spring source (5 meters away) and offer eggs...

I’m currently in Japan and we are starting 2014 ahead of almost everybody else. As we entered the new year, I wish that 2014 will bring you health, and of course photographical inspiration. I cannot do anything for your health but I can definitely try to inspire you: I have started this year by visiting Japan and the famous snow monkeys near Nagano (Jigokudani Yaen-Koen). Snow is falling, it’s all white and cold but really nice. Japan took a bit of time for me to enjoy but now I love this country. It was an adventure for us to drive on our own to the snow monkeys park (driving on the left, with road signs in a different alphabet, I really do not recommend it unless you are an experience left-side driver and you know some basic Japanese). We are...

The year is almost over and it’s time to look back at my work for 2013. From a pure statistical perspective, 2013 has been my most productive year ever. Probably due to the fact that I have traveled the most (76 days of travel and 7 countries). All the images presented here are available for licensing or as fine art prints.

Aurora borealis or Northern lights (for us in the northern hemisphere) is caused by the collision of energetic charged particles with atoms in the high altitude atmosphere. When the particles collide with the gases in the ionosphere they start to glow. The northern lights can range from a simple green faint flow over the horizon to a bright “curtain” of lights dancing above you (and bright enough to cast a shadow like full moon). I did not realize until recently that this is a bucket list item for many people, so in this post I’m going to share my experience chasing aurora. First to see the aurora, you need to have a clear, dark night. It implies being far away from civilization to avoid any light pollution. The dark night is a bit tricky since...

The full moon this month was going to rise right above Alcatraz and then set above the south tower of the Golden Gate bridge. It meant waking up before 5am to catch the moon setting and then later that day going back to San Francisco to photograph the moon rising above Alcatraz around sunset time. The moon is exactly aligned with the top of the tower only for a very quick instant. I did my best to “guestimate” where I should be (which means a bit of running with a 400mm lens, a heavy tripod and camera). While I was doing my “guestimation”, clouds were blocking the moon on and off. At the last minute, literally, the clouds opened up, I took three shots and the moon was gone for ever behind clouds. Here are two of those shots: That same...

Last weekend I joined Frederic Larson’s meetup in Napa to photograph hot air balloons. The balloons are flying almost daily over Napa but on a nice weekend, you can have as many as 10 balloons in the air at the same time. Meetups are a great way to do things you would not otherwise think of doing. My favorite quote from Frederic is: “If you don’t change something, how could you expect different results”. My interpretation is: if you always wake up at the same time, you will always end up with the same photographs. Change you wake up time and see something different. So for this meetup, we woke up at 4:30am, in order to be in Youtville by 6:45am. From there, we carpooled to the launching spot where a fair number of balloons where already...