Beth Young

At sunrise, before the sunlight pierces through the forest’s dense canopy, Olympic National Park's Hoh Rainforest is awash in soft, diffuse light, perfect for finding woodland compositions and revealing lush moss textures 💚🍁

This fall, I skipped my usual autumn haunts and headed to the Olympic Peninsula and I honestly didn’t know how much fall color to expect but the glowing yellow maples lit up the dark, dense forest like they were lit from within; my latest Golden Hours post is live with new images

This fall, I skipped my usual autumn haunts and headed to the Olympic Peninsula and I honestly didn’t know how much fall color to expect but the glowing yellow maples lit up the dark, dense forest like they were lit from within 💛

Today I turn 56. This month marks 10 years since a routine mammogram found breast cancer. I wrote about what those 10 years have given me & how cancer changed the way I see, both behind the camera and in life. It's the most personal thing I've published. I'd be honored if you read it 🩷

For any nature photographer interested in the healthcare art market, I’ve compiled 10 years of my experience, practical advice and a lot of helpful resources here. I don’t see this market as a competition and happy to share my experience to encourage others.

I’m spending this autumn photographing the plant life along the American River, the wild corridor that winds right through our city and quietly shelters an astonishing diversity of species. None of these were hard to find. They were just easy to walk past.

Hey everyone! I just launched something new called The Mindful Frame, a weekly photography prompt series that follows the rhythm of nature. The first prompt drops Tuesday morning. It's simple, it's free, and it's designed for anyone who's been feeling a little creatively stuck🍂

Happy first day of autumn! In Yosemite Valley, the real season doesn't arrive until the black oaks catch fire in late fall. Until then, here's what I'm waiting for. 🍂 Swipe for a surprise at the end. ❄️

I went into this summer as a photographer and came out of it as someone who has finally understood that the garden is not just a location, it's also a philosophy. The most powerful thing you can bring into the field isn't a better lens or a more dramatic location. It's a state of mind.

Familiar trail, new view. It had been years since I'd walked Damnation Creek Trail in Del Norte Coast Redwoods, and the forest I remembered had changed. Clearings opened up views I'd never seen here, the light breaking through the canopy and landed on one small sapling among the giants 💚

I sat down with Chris Stafford for her AART Podcast (spotlighting women artists across every medium). Watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Would love to know what part resonates with you and I hope you enjoy it! 👇 youtu.be/ycHAia6AThc?...

Can spiky desert plants be appropriate subjects for healthcare art? In this article, I say a resounding YES! 💚

Flowers that dance Japanese Anemones might be among my favorite subjects at Longwood Gardens; that curvilinear stem structure, buds dangling like little charms, blooms in soft pink and butter-yellow that have a playfulness to them. And, the bees seem to love them, too!

Everything in the Silver Garden greenhouse at Longwood Gardens is built to survive drought: spines, waxy coatings, jagged edges, none of which sound soothing. But get in close, soften your focus, and those same defenses become pure abstraction 🌱

Swallowtails were everywhere at Longwood Gardens, moving from bloom to bloom with an electric energy that made them fascinating to watch and nearly impossible to photograph. Every time I found focus, they'd already decided the next flower looked better! 🦋💕

Longwood Garden's Waterlily Court has been welcoming photographers to its obsidian pools since 1957, and many years later, those same flower-laden black pools still teach the same lesson I keep holding onto: and that is that you don't need epic geography or weather to make an image that matters 🪷

Typically one interconnected root system, the vertical rhythm of evenly spaced white aspen trunks is reminiscent of architectural spaces where columns, thresholds, and enclosure shape how a body feels safe in a room, only an aspen grove accomplishes that naturally 💚

Up at 4 in the morning and at Carson Pass by sunrise. Peak wildflower season had passed, and the hillsides had mostly gone to seed, but an inch off the ground, I found a whole world of small displays of coyote mint, button parsley, aster, paintbrush, and angelica. Worth every minute of lost sleep!

Something I've been quietly building for months is finally live: a mindful photography mini-retreat, designed exclusively for women. Full story on the publication today. 🌿

Exploring dirt roads and tiny waterfalls framed by radiant autumn color under diffuse, overcast light is my idea of a blissfully perfect fall day. A classic scene found in the Great Smoky Mountains NP. With 104 degree temperatures in Sacramento today, I am wishing I were here instead!

My favorite alpine wildflower excursions this summer, from Sequoia National Park to Lassen to Crested Butte to Tahoe 🥰🩷

When I present at the Outdoor Photo Alliance conference in Colorado, we were all asked to bring 10 printed images to share; I love this idea to promote physical prints in this age of digital image consumption! I decided to print this one of the unique rock formations of Roxborough State Park 💚

I recently went to Crested Butte for the carpets of wildflowers. What I found was something far more intimate; five days in the mountains lying in meadows that weren't what I planned for, finding little pink elephants and curling leaves in the golden light.💜 open.substack.com/pub/optimalf...

Just a simple, colorful bouquet of Colorado wildflowers rendered in high key. A soothing image for your Monday 🩵

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In Gunnison National Forest, looking up at the tree canopy in one of Colorado’s oldest aspen forests revealed the delicate leaf textures against the blue morning sky. When I happened to look up and find a perfectly composed grouping of aspens, I couldn't resist capturing it 🩵

Fleabane is one of Colorado's most common and overlooked wildflowers, but what makes them remarkable is their profusion of fine, thin petals, sometimes over 100 per flower head. These are quiet workhorses for local pollinators, feeding native bees and butterflies through the short alpine summer 🩵

Direct sun on a shallow Colorado creek bed, turning ordinary stones into a shifting mosaic of gold and blue, shot at a fast shutter to freeze the ripples mid-motion. As the water shifts with every current, it is gone the second it forms.

The iron-rich, rust-red slope of Cinnamon Mountain stands as a striking backdrop to the foreground trees atop Paradise Divide in Colorado, illuminated by the setting sun, and perfectly reflected in a still alpine pond.

A couple of weeks ago, I showed you Lassen Volcanic National Park's fire scars from above. This week, I show you what the same landscape offers when you kneel down and look close. The story of a recovering forest repeats itself an inch off the ground, in miniature.

Wandering the shoreline of Kings Creek in Lassen Volcanic NP, I kept finding these ready-made bouquets of lupine, arrowleaf groundsel, and corn lily arranging themselves against the moving water. A slow shutter let the creek blur into silk while the flowers held still.

Along a tiny alpine pond in Colorado, its surface reflected Cinnamon Mountain's rust-red slopes and softened them to peach. I got low with a telephoto to isolate a few botanicals against the reflection, an accident of light and water that felt more like an abstract painting than a landscape 🩵

The fog held cool, blue and thick for an hour after I arrived on the trail, then the sun found a small gap and everything warmed at once, right where this broken old stump stood: split, splintered, still standing, holding up ferns and moss that carpet the forest floor.

What I found in Lassen Volcanic NP wasn't devastation, it was recovery in progress. I've spent years afraid of wildfire, the way we all are out West now. This morning in Lassen didn't cure that. But it showed me what resilience can look like: not untouched, but still here, and growing.

A morning of drifting fog and ever‑changing shafts of light transformed the redwood forest into a living cathedral. Then came fogbows: subtle, milky arcs created when sunlight bends through microscopic droplets suspended in the air. Ethereal echoes of rainbows that appear like spirits in the forest

There’s something clarifying about escape by altitude. The air was cool, the light was soft, and the forest was alive with the sound of birdsong. 🌸

The healthcare art market has its own logic, its own language, and its own set of unwritten rules. And none of them are particularly obvious from the outside. This post is what I wish someone had handed me at the beginning.

Barely the size of a pencil eraser. Blanketing the forest floor in waves of violet and gold. Whiskerbrush rewards the photographer willing to get down in the dirt, lens at flower level. That's when the background transforms and a bloom smaller than your thumbnail becomes its own entire universe.

The ancient sequoia forest awakens with the sound of birdsong, and when the rising sun pierces the dense canopy of these towering giants, the tiny native flowers that carpet the forest floor, barely the size of my thumbnail, glow in the morning light.🌸✨

Ancient redwoods. Native rhododendrons in bloom. Coastal fog. And a fogbow that lasted just long enough to photograph. I've been thinking about what these images mean for healing spaces, and about a quality researchers call awe, and what it does to a person who is sick, anxious, or afraid. 🩷

A series of images I call “campsite photography” while boondocking on national forest land at the base of Mount Shasta, these slightly beaten up and unassuming seed heads could’ve easily been overlooked but became some of my favorite images from a quick trip to one of my favorite places in the world

When I started photographing intentionally for healthcare environments, something unexpected happened. It didn’t just change what ended up on hospital walls. It changed fundamentally how I see in the field.💚

On my annual pilgrimage to California’s Lost Coast, I can’t help secretly (perhaps not so secretly) hope for those fleeting fog conditions. My favorite moments are when warm sunlight softens the fog’s edges against the cool blue sky, lending an ethereal softness to the towering redwood forest.🩵

Pink dogwood blossoms covered with fresh spring snow and Half Dome wrapped in clouds. Snow on trees that were already budding out in full spring green. Sierra weather has a sense of humor! My latest dispatch from Yosemite Valley is live on Substack 🌿

The poppy has long been a symbol of remembrance — its vivid petals a quiet tribute to those who gave everything so we could stand in fields like this one, taking in this beauty. In honor of Memorial Day, thank you to every soul who made this moment possible ❤️🌸

From the base of Mount Whitney in the Alabama Hills to the shoreline of the American River in Sacramento, native lupine paints the California landscape in violet and lavender every spring. Get low, find the light, each petal catches a soft halo of gold and the world blurs into something luminous.💜

My second "Healing Frame" article is live this morning getting a little more into the science, and answering a question I get asked all the time: does it actually matter what kind of nature images hang on hospital walls? It does! open.substack.com/pub/optimalf...

I just launched a series called The Healing Frame about something I’ve lived from 3 distinct angles: as an architect with decades of healthcare facility design experience, as a nature photographer whose work hangs in hospitals, and as a patient who spent nearly 2 years in treatment for cancer.

Winter wasn't done with Yosemite. A late spring storm rolled through Ahwahnee Meadow overnight, leaving a fresh dusting of snow on trees that were already weeks into leafing out. Half Dome emerged slowly through clearing fog — the valley caught between seasons.

A seed head growing along an ordinary sidewalk on an ordinary day. I had a quiet hope in mind while editing: that someone having a hard day might look up and feel, for just a moment, like the world is still full of quiet, gentle things.