Photography by Leighton

Name: Photography by Leighton
Address: 777 Ward Ave, Honolulu, HI, 96814, US
Telephone: 18083987689

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At Photography by Leighton we sell professional and high quality prints at affordable prices. We also run a variety of photo workshops and expeditions.

11/04/2026

I was photographing something else in Komodo National Park on our Wild Indonesia trip when I noticed two young dragons puffing themselves up in an aggressive posture. Adult dragons had taken down a small wild boar a few days earlier, and these two were fighting over the scraps left behind.

Before I knew it, they had both reared up on two legs! The larger dragon asserted his dominance, trying to body slam the smaller one and chase it away. It was over in the blink of an eye, and I came away with just a few frames of it.

Komodo dragons are the largest lizards in the world, and they live on only a handful of Indonesian islands. I never expected to see two of them standing up and fighting like this.

Did you know Komodo dragons could stand up on two legs?

11/03/2026

It’s Polar Bear Week, and it has me thinking about all the time I’ve spent with these amazing animals over the years.

Photographing them in Churchill and Svalbard has taught me the same lesson in two very different places: you work on the bear’s terms. You keep your distance, stay patient, and let the bear decide what happens next.

Every fall, polar bears gather near Churchill along Hudson Bay, waiting for the sea ice to return so they can hunt seals. That ice-free stretch now runs three to four weeks longer than it did in the 1980s. With less ice, more bears are coming ashore in more places, which means more encounters with people. This year’s Polar Bear Week focuses on helping bears and people live safely together, and has more on that work at pbears.org/polarbearweek.

I can’t wait to get back out there in July 2027, when I head to Svalbard with our Art of Seeing group.

11/02/2026

Mahalo to everyone who came out to the Hawaiʻi Holiday Craft & Gift Fair at the Blaisdell this weekend! Whether you took home a print, shared a story, or just stopped by to say aloha, it was great to see you. Leighton and Ren really enjoyed talking story with all of you.

If you didn’t make it or are still thinking about that print, we’ll be back at the Blaisdell Exhibition Hall for the December fair on December 18–20. It’s a good chance to pick up holiday gifts or take home a print for yourself.

See you in December!

www.islandimagesco.com

10/30/2026

If you’re on Oʻahu this weekend, come say hi! I’ll be at the Island Images booth at the Hawaiʻi Holiday Craft & Gift Fair at the Blaisdell Center Exhibition Hall, which opens today.

This honu cave image made it to the finalist round in Underwater Photographer of the Year this year, and it’s one of the new prints we’ll have at the booth. Ren and I have also brought a bunch of other new metal and canvas pieces, so if you’ve been to our booth before, there’s plenty you haven’t seen yet.

Fair hours are Friday 12–7, Saturday 10–6, and Sunday 10–5. Stop by, talk story, and check out the prints in person. Hope to see some familiar faces!

10/29/2026

It hadn’t rained in Mana Pools for months. The floodplain was cracked and dusty, and the heat was brutal. Then the first big storm of the season finally rolled in.

The painted wolves hunted right through it. They made their kill in the pouring rain and fed just a few feet from where I was standing. When the food was gone, they didn’t go looking for shelter. They started playing in the puddles while the rain kept coming down.

Family is everything to these dogs. They hunt together and share every kill. They bring food back for the pups, and they feed injured pack members who can’t hunt for themselves. Play like this is part of what holds them together.

This is the Nyamatusi pack, and their family has a story. You may know it from David Attenborough’s Dynasties. They descend from Tait, the old matriarch in the Painted Wolf episode, and her daughter Tammy, who took over the pack after her.

I’ve watched a lot of wild dogs. I’ve never seen a pack look this happy. There are only around 6,500 left in the wild, and moments like this are why I keep coming back to Mana Pools.

Would you have guessed wild dogs love the rain this much?

10/28/2026

I went to the Galapagos on a personal scouting trip just to see what the islands were all about, and the marine iguanas ended up being one of the highlights. We dove in from shore and waited for the day to heat up. Once the iguanas got warm enough on the rocks, they started heading into the surf to cool down and feed, and that’s when we got in the water with them.

These islands are volcanic and sit about 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador. The leading idea is that the iguanas’ ancestors drifted over from South America on rafts of vegetation. With very little to eat on land, they adapted to the sea, and today they’re the only lizards in the world that forage in the ocean. They have flattened tails for swimming, blunt snouts for scraping algae off the rocks, and they sneeze out the extra salt they take in while feeding.

Watching them graze right in the surge was something else. I got bashed against the rocks more than a few times, but they barely moved. Their claws are incredibly strong, and they just clamped down and kept eating while the waves rolled over them.

Would you have gotten in the water with them?

10/27/2026

One of the most common things I see on workshops is the instinct to zoom in as tight as possible. The animal fills the frame, every whisker is sharp, and it feels like a win. Sometimes it is. But a lot of the time the more interesting picture is the one where you back off and let the place tell part of the story.

All eight of these are from this year, and in every one the animal is only part of the frame. The spectacled bear in Ecuador is tucked into a tree draped in moss, and the moss is what makes it feel like the cloud forest. The jaguar in the Pantanal is resting behind a tangle of riverbank roots in the last light of the day. The two brown bears in Finland are standing up and sparring with the whole boreal forest lit up behind them. The coastal brown bear in Katmai is walking the tidal flats with the mountains and storm clouds stacked up in the background. And in Namibia, the leopard is stretched out in a tree under the moon, and the oryx are grazing in front of those huge red dunes.

Any of these animals would have made a nice tight portrait, but you’d lose where they live. The habitat says something about the animal that a close-up can’t, how big its world is and what it has to deal with every day.

So next time you’re out, take your tight shots, then pull back or switch lenses and look at the whole scene. Ask yourself what the environment adds. You might find the frame where the animal is only a small part of the picture is the one you end up liking most.

10/26/2026

We went back to look for Veronica and found her again, this time on her own, up in the moss-covered branches of the cloud forest. It didn't take long before she caught our scent. She lifted her nose and spent a good while sniffing the air in our direction, working out who we were.

Like other bears, Andean bears rely heavily on smell to find food and read what's around them. They're strong climbers and spend much of their time in the trees, often pulling branches together into platforms to rest and feed. Veronica is well known to the researchers here, and you might recognize her from NBC's The Americas. Her pale facial markings are hers alone, which is how they tell individuals apart.

After a few minutes she seemed satisfied and went back to ignoring us.

10/24/2026

This one made us work for it. To find Veronica again yesterday, we took a zip line across the river, hiked up the hill through a string of switchbacks, and inched out onto a narrow ledge before we finally had a view.

And there she was, stretched out in a fig tree like she had nowhere to be. After all that effort, she couldn't have looked more relaxed.

What's the furthest you've ever gone to get a shot?

10/22/2026

Paddington is real, and yesterday morning I met two of them.

High in the Andes, we found Veronica and Zac lounging in a big fig tree draped in Spanish moss, about 30 to 40 feet up and without a care in the world. Veronica is a well-known female who was featured in NBC's The Americas, and Zac is a young subadult. This was my first time ever seeing an Andean bear, and I'm still buzzing.

These are the only bears in South America and the last short-faced bear left on the planet. They're mostly vegetarian, spend a surprising amount of time in the trees, and are listed as Vulnerable, with roughly 10,000 adults left in the wild.

Be honest: had you ever heard of the Andean bear before this?

Address

777 Ward Ave
Honolulu, HI
96814

Telephone

18083987689

Website

http://www.photographybyleighton.com/

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