Date: November 2019
Location: Baja California Sur
To see the editorial feature on this trip check out the current issue of The Drake Magazine
The two images below are outtakes.
Date: November 2019
Location: Baja California Sur
To see the editorial feature on this trip check out the current issue of The Drake Magazine
The two images below are outtakes.
Hereās a new image of the Picabo Hillsānear Silver Creek, Idaho.
Picabo Hills. Spring. 2020
New work in Strung Magazine. This shot was taken a few years back on the Limay River in Argentina. Itās of Pablo ViƱaras, a Limay River Lodge guide, on a late summer day fishing a side channel.
I just got back from two weeks in Cuba. The first week was spent traveling to Vinales and Cienfuegos and photographing Cuban people.
I had never spent any time in either of these two places and they were both striking in different ways: ViƱales is a small town in western Cuba with low mountain ranges and lush valleys that produce tobacco, coffee, and honey. There are plenty of casa particularesāthink Airbnb. These are homes and rooms for rent and often the owner cooks meals for guests as well. I used casa particulares in ViƱales, Cienfuegos, and Havana.
Cienfuegos is an industrial town of approx 165,000 along the south-central coast. Itās not touristy like nearby Trinidad and has beautiful, yet worn-out, French colonial architecture.
My second week was spent in Cayo Largo on a live-aboard yacht fishing for a week. We didnāt have cell or wifi and were quite surprised when we got back to Havana to hear the global news. Everyone in my group made it back home safely and fortunately painlessly.
Two men. Cienfuegos, Cuba.
97-year-old man. Cienfuegos, Cuba.
Woman on a Cienfuegos street at dusk.
Vinales, Cuba
Tobacco farmerācampesino. ViƱales, Cuba.
Campesino. Vinales, Cuba.
Campesino. Vinales, Cuba.
Campesino hand. ViƱales.
Cienfuegos, Cuba
Excited to have work in the new issue of The Drake. Itās on Magdalena Bay in Baja, Mexico shot this November on a trip with John Huber who wrote the piece.
The biggest surprise for me was having the opportunity to free dive with feeding marlin in the blue water. A group of four scientists happened to be staying at the same hotel John and I were at and they were there to free dive with striped marlin and record data with sonar for a variety of purposes including measuring speed. In any event, they mentioned it and said it was safe enough and I thought, āIām in.ā
The following two days John and I spent fly fishing to marlin and free diving with them. To read Johnās great piece and to check out the images, go grab a copy.
Silver Creek. February 2020
Looking and feeling more like spring than winter around here lately. Here are two images of Silver Creek from two evenings ago.
A hint of smoke on a South Island summer evening taken a few weeks ago from the headwaters of a large catchment.
Excited to have the cover of the new issue of American Angler. This shot was taken a few summerās ago on Silver Creek on what was a truly memorable July day on Silver Creek. This was in the afternoon which meant the crowds had left after the morning hatch and the Creek was virtually void of fishermenāat least on the section I was on.
Excited to have a photo essay in the new issue of the Big Sky Journal. Thanks to trout guides here in Idaho and Montana and also in Argentina and New Zealand for being a part of it.
Two shots of the same location⦠Up close and pulled back.
9:30 pm and still a bit light⦠This image was taken from our camp looking upstream on a warm summer evening a week or so ago. New Zealand.
I just added the below image to the Black and White prints section of this web site. I shot it on a recent trip to New Zealand where the water can be extraordinarily clear.
Heaven⦠This was a river that I had been wanting to visit for years and finally was able to make it in.
Emily Rodger in the distance gets in one last pool before the sun goes down on a backcountry South Island river.
I just got back from a great trip down to New Zealandās South Island. I was down there on a few different photo assignments both fly fishing related. The South Island is my favorite place to trout fish on the planet for a variety of reasons including the challenges of spotting / stalking the fish coupled with the fact that itās just beautiful there. An added bonus is the Brown Trout can get really big as well despite the fact a great day on the water typically doesnāt mean catching dozens of fish like it can in the States and Patagonia.
This also happens to be a mouse year which, for those of you who donāt know, in short means: The native beech trees historically every seven or so years produce a great deal more (10x to 100x) the number of seeds which is called masting. Non-native mice and rats that feed off of the seeds have such an abundance of food they begin to reproduce at a much greater rate and all of sudden there are far more mouse and rats scurrying around South Island beech forests.
The South Island is known for large and wary brown trout to begin with but on mouse years some fish can add 40% more weight. The mice eventually make it down to the rivers edge on many watersheds where many believe, as I do, that mice actually try to cross the river. Iām sure some accidentally fall in but anecdotal evidence points to the intent to cross and generally mice do this at night and brown trout are known to be nocturnal feedersā¦
Iāll be posting more images but here are two images of the same fish both above and below the water. We estimate this brown to be in excess of 15lbs but unfortunately didnāt have a net to weigh it.
Iāve tried hard not to post many fish out of the water over the last few years but Iām including the first image below to show the size of the fish as youāll likely agree that the second image belowāwhich is of the same fishāappears smaller.
Emily Rodger holds a beautiful South Island brown.
Winter. Silver Creek.
Hereās an image I took last night. The temp was 5 below zero. An otherwise beautiful evening thoughā¦
Silver Creek, Idaho
I just added the image below to the āGiclee Color Printsā section of this site.
Wheel Line. Winter. II
Excited to get the cover and have a feature story on the Faraway Cayes (Honduras) in the new (Winter 2020) issue of Anglers Journal. Iām very grateful to have had the opportunity to spend as much time as I did out there a few years ago.
Steve Brown, the owner of Fly Fish Guanaja, spent an entire year jumping through hurdle after hurdle trying to create what Faraway Cay is today. Getting government approval in this third world country isnāt easy⦠If you havenāt seen the short film, Beyond the Horizon, itās worth the watch.
It started withāfor me at leastāthe long 26 hour or so boat ride to get to Faraway Cay. Miskito Indians visited us daily. Permit came onto the flats in front of the key on each incoming tide once the reef had enough water on it. Pretty spectacular placeā¦