Stephen Bay's Photography Blog

For the longest time, I’ve thought of landscape photography as being synonymous with travel.

A partial lunar eclipse is visible at Balboa Park, San Diego on August 27, 2026.

Landscape photography often involves significant travel.

The holy grail for landscape photographers is to be able to accurately predict sunrise and sunset colors.

During the past year, I’ve been sharing many of my astro-landscapes and one thing that people have repeatedly asked me is how do I get my foregrounds so detailed and clean.

Reflection of the Milky Way and night sky on the surface of a lake.

I do a fair amount of printing on metal (Chromaluxe) and I’ve tested out many different printing labs.

In December, I like to photograph the various public Christmas trees in San Diego.

With programs like Starry Landscape Stacker or Sequator image stacking for noise reduction has become very easy to do.

Two of the most popular techniques in astrophotography are image stacking and star tracking.

Here’s a recent photo I made of a rainbow above San Diego’s downtown.

If you are a landscape photographer, you’ve probably heard of Manhattanhenge where the sunrise or sunset aligns with the streets of Manhattan.

This is a photo of the White Lady cave in La Jolla.

I’m a good note taker and over the years I’ve collected a number of photography quotes.

One of the problems landscape photographers face is how to adequately expose for the foreground without blowing out the sky.

So you received your notification from the fair and have advanced to Tier 2 where you need to submit physical prints.

Normally, I like to take wide landscape shots where I try to get everything in the frame including an epic sunset.

I often get asked where’s a good place to photograph in San Diego.

I’ve been working on a project to photograph sea caves on the San Diego coast.

As a photographer, you’ve probably heard of DNG files and are wondering if there is any advantage in using them and if so, is it worth converting your existing library of raw files.

Here’s a short end-of-year checklist for photgraphers.

Panorama of the San Diego skyline taken from Point Loma.

This is an issue that initially confused me to no end.

Traditionally prints are signed with a pencil and I prefer to use one whenever I can.

I’ve been photographing the sea caves around San Diego for the past several years.

I made this photo at Imperial Beach Pier which is only a few miles north of the border with Mexico.

As someone who prints a lot, I often get asked if it’s worth buying a possibly very expensive printer and printing your work at home.

This summer I made a few trips out to the California desert to photograph some abandoned trains and railway tracks.

This is the second in a series of “making of” articles where I cover the creative and technical choices behind a photo that I’ve been working on.

I thought I’d start a “making of” series where I cover the creative and technical choices behind a photo that I’ve been working on.

Although I am a photographer, I think it’s important to study the work of other visual artists especially those in different mediums.

If you’ve ever had a hard time finding a photo that you took before, couldn’t find the original raw file for a jpeg that you have, or found multiple copies of an image but couldn’t tell which was the final version then read on.

I recently tried out a new software program for star stacking called Kandao Raw+.

Adobe just released a new update to Camera Raw with a feature they call Super Resolution (this should be available in Lightroom soon).

Lightroom has a great set of tools for editing your images.

Blend if and luminosity masks are two different methods in Photoshop for determining how a layer is combined with those beneath it.

With today’s high resolution cameras, focus stacking is pretty much a necessity to get the maximum detail out of the sensor.

If you have a photography website, you’re probably aware that the biggest obstacle to obtaining quick page load times is the size of your image files.

When I first started focusing on landscapes (I shifted from travel photography) I was always chasing the light and seeking that epic sunrise or sunset.

Recently I’ve been trying programs like Topaz AI to correct some issues in photos that I that I messed up technically.

I have been a longtime user of Crashplan’s cloud backup service.

I often get questions about the exact location where I’ve taken a photograph.

Beginning photographers often ask me how best to improve their work.

When I’m making a photograph, whether it’s a photo I’ve planned out well in advance or it’s something I stumbled upon in the moment, I think about the following elements: Subject Light Composition Uniqueness Technical Quality The first 3 are what I call t…

For some reason I like taking photos of astro subjects from the middle of the San Diego.

Probably the most technically difficult shot to achieve in landscape astrophotography is a tracked panorama.

I love to print my own photos but when I started printing I was overwhelmed by the incredible number of papers available.

Get a free video download where I go over the basics of photographing the Milky Way.

As a night sky photographer, when I’m looking for locations to photograph, I pay close attention to the amount of light pollution in the skies.

While I was out on my last shoot, I did a quick test to show the effects of diffraction on image sharpness.