Camera: Most (75%?) of the photos on the site are with a medium format (6x7cm) rangefinder camera. The others are with a 35mm. single lens reflex (SLR) camera. Even though the rangefinder on my camera was broken when I bought it, (I saved some money on the demo model and use the distance scales on the lens to focus) a rangefinder has several advantages over a SLR camera. They don't have a glass prism that adds to the weight. It doesn't have a mirror that flaps up and down causing vibrations. Locking it up eliminates this but also eliminates your view of the subject. Most importantly, lenses on rangefinders are designed to be placed very close to the film. On SLRs there is a gap where the mirror sits. I don't understand the optics, but this allows for a sharper lens design than one that needs to project the light across the gap to the film. My color lab says that my negatives contain as much detail as those produced by a 5x7 inch view camera. A rangefinder is more difficult to use when using telephoto lenses. Accurate focusing and framing are more difficult, but since I don't backpack with telephoto equipment, and prefer landscapes to tighter-cropped portraits, this didn't matter to me.

Film: All film and digital sensors are more contrasty than the human eye. I‘ve always used color negative film because it is less contrasty than slide film, thus giving more realistic results, which has always been my goal. Even so, on most prints the light areas need to be burned (darkened) and the dark areas need to be lightened (dodged) in order to approximate the way the scene actually appeared to my eye.

Filters: The standard UV filter is the only one I use. Although it reduces sharpness a bit, it has protected the far more valuable underlying lens. Although they supposedly reduce UV fogging, my with-and-without tests have all been indistinguishable. I used to carry a polarizing filter, but it gave unrealistic looking results and the loss of sharpness was noticeable. I also used to carry a split neutral density filter but I ended up with too many abnormal looking results such as reflections on water that were the same tone or lighter than the object being reflected, or an irrational tonal gradient on an object that should be uniformly colored.

Lenses: I estimate that 95 % of all my photos and an even higher percentage of the ones on this site were taken with a wide-angle lens. By showing both broad vistas, close details and many things in between, they give the best feeling of what it is like to be standing in the Sierra enjoying the scenery. The older photos, with a 35mm camera, were with a 24-50mm zoom usually in the 24 to 30 mm range. Most photos (75%?) are with a medium format camera using a 50mm lens, which is about the equivalent of a 24mm lens on a 35mm camera. I also carried a 90mm (roughly equal to a 'normal' 50mm lens on a 35mm camera) but it mostly takes up space and adds weight.