Posts Tagged ‘Sierra Nevada’

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Monday Blog Blog: Greg Boyer

May 16th, 2011

Monday Blog Blog: Greg Boyer Photography

Raised on ranches as a boy and now living in Bishop, California in the shadow of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, Greg Boyer first became serious about photography in the early 1970s. He first began making landscape photographs at age 12 when his father gave him an Argus C3. In 1960, a trip to Yosemite National Park helped spark his creative inspiration. By the time he reached age 13, he had been to 18 states.

Moonrise Over Mono Lake, Eastern Sierra Nevada, California, copyright 2008 by Greg Boyer.

(View the photograph larger Click Here.)

(What in the world is Monday Blog Blog? To find out more read the blog post, “Monday Blog Blog Celebration.”)

Greg Boyer’s father was in the Army Air Corp which became the US Air Force. He later became a safety engineer for a the U.S. government and in the Missile Industry. The family began ranching in California and then moved to Idaho north of Boise along the Payette River. Greg Boyer worked on his father’s ranch while also photographing and hiking the mountains and back country of Idaho.

In the mid 1970s and early 1980s, Greg Boyer worked as a well driller and did construction work building irrigation pumping plants along the Sacramento river in California. At the zenith of Greg Boyer’s early photography life, he recently explained, he dove in more deeply and then faded after a camera catastrophe and other life changes:

I was about the same age as Galen Rowell. He was in all the magazines. He was an outdoor hero. I was doing mountain climbing and some of the same things he was but on a smaller scale. I was always an explorer as a kid. The last year I was very serious about photography was 1975 when I was photographing on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho, a wild and wooly place. I was using a Nikon F2. I had a 500 mm lens on and I was getting ready to change the focusing screen. I set the camera down and it fell off the rock perch I set it on at the edge of a deep gorge. I was rummaging in my camera bag trying to find the focusing screen and all I heard was the first clunk of my camera bouncing several times down in the ravine. I turned around and the camera was gone. On the second bounce I saw the body go one direction and the lens go the other. Soon after that my ex wife and I moved back to California in 1975. I was drilling wells and the work was demanding. I didn’t have the time to devote to photography that I wanted to. I was raising a family. I still made snapshots of my kids and family vacations.

Greg Boyer worked for Campbell Soup for 14 years as a maintenance planner. When an opportunity to go back to school came, he took it. He attended UC Davis in Multi-Media Design, where he learned about video production and Photoshop, which he had originally started to learn in 1992. He worked in Video Production from 1997 to 2005. Around that time the video business began to change. The video company he worked for and many others were casualties.

In 2004 Greg Boyer bought a Nikon D2X digital camera. With his extensive knowledge of Photoshop, he also began digital printing. Thus began a whole new experience with photography:

With digital photography I found out how to express the way I saw a scene. I couldn’t do that with film. Digital landscape photography was everything film photography could have been to me but that I never had with film. I never had the tools to do what I really wanted to do until digital came along.  It’s the immediacy of the digital image. You can see right away what you have. You can look at the image and at the histogram and then do something different if it doesn’t work. In the film era you didn’t know what you had until you had the rolls processed. Then you might never make it back to the same place, or you had to get back there in the same conditions.

In late 2005, Greg Boyer was diagnosed with Emphysema. When he told his son, his son said, “Well, you better quit wasting time.” After thinking about it, Greg Boyer realized his son was right. He decided to change his lifestyle and do what he really loved, which meant getting back in touch with nature and taking up photography again. Soon afterwards he moved to Bishop, California to be near the Sierra Nevada in a small-town atmosphere and clean air. Greg Boyer described his experience of connecting with nature and the philosophy behind it:

Krishnamurti was an influence on the way I look at what I’m doing in landscape photography. I go out and get absorbed by my surroundings. When I’m out taking photographs it is a spiritual experience of that moment in time and space when it is all yours. You are it and it is you. Krishnamurti wrote about seeing and not categorizing. His philosophy was that by defining something you separate yourself from it. He gave me a new way of being out and connected to nature. Civilization’s mistake is in separating from the natural world.

In the Eastern Sierra Nevada Greg Boyer now goes backpacking at least twice a year. He still carries 50-60 pounds of gear on backpacks including cameras and lenses. Greg Boyer said he is ‘living the dream,’ but he is glad he doesn’t have to rely on photography for a living in today’s conditions. He has the freedom to pursue landscape photography as he likes:

I’m enjoying life and having a good time. This is the way life was meant to be. I’m blessed to be doing what I love in a beautiful place. At Campbell Soup some people had been working there for 35-40 years and hated every minute of it. I feel bad for people who are stuck doing something they have no idea they can get out of. Many people are not doing what they love to do. I like sharing what I’m doing in photography. I like the interaction with other photographers in the photo blogosphere. Besides, I live a few blocks from Galen Rowell’s Mountain Light Gallery.

Take a close look at Greg Boyer Photography and his blog, which offer an inspirational perspective on landscape photography. His blog posts about Photoshop and other post-processing tools and techniques provide an experienced presentation of simple and advanced methods.

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Earth Day Celebration Of Ardis And Philip Hyde And Canyonlands

April 29th, 2011

Happy Earth Day 2011:

From The Archives…

Offering a Blessing for Future Generations and Tossing a Pinch Of Ardis and Philip Hyde’s Ashes in The Needles, Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Ardis, David and Philip Hyde In The Maze, Canyonlands National Park, Utah, 1968 by Parker "Ham" Hamilton. David Leland Hyde at age three was the youngest child to ride horseback into The Maze for many years, perhaps even to this day. The Hydes and Hamiltons were guided into The Maze, Canyonlands National Park, Utah by Art Ekker and his son A. C. Ekker, who later hosted and became friends with Robert Redford when he rode into their Robbers Roost Ranch in search of the real Outlaw Trail. Robert Redford wrote a book called, "The Outlaw Trail" and a National Geographic Article in 1976 that depicted A. C. Ekker on the cover.

(To see the photograph full screen Click Here.)

This was the 50th blog post of Landscape Photography Blogger. Originally published April 22, 2010.

Update (2012): Please see my blog post, “Earth Day 2012 Review: Are Social Media Earth Friendly?”

(This year [2011] I was traveling on the days around Earth Day and in airports and airplanes most of Earth Day itself. Not so Earth-friendly, but it was for a good cause.)

Back to 2010…. To celebrate this milestone and Earth Day, I have posted a journal entry from July 30, 2008, that I wrote in Canyonlands National Park. I originally planned to start Landscape Photography Blogger with this post.

A Mission And Pilgrimage

A few months before my father, landscape photographer Philip Hyde passed on, he and I talked about taking a small amount of my mother Ardis Hyde’s ashes and his ashes, mixing them together and sprinkling just a pinch in some of their favorite places they helped preserve like Canyonlands National Park, Grand Canyon National Park and other monuments and wilderness areas of the Southwestern Desert Landscape, the California Mountains and elsewhere. This is of course not legal, but a small pinch would not hurt anything. It would merely nourish the sage and primrose.

Most of their ashes are sprinkled around in the woods and gardens of the home I grew up in that they built in the wilderness of the northern Sierra Nevada in Northeastern California. I would begin to distribute the rest from a small pouch on my way from Boulder, Colorado back to the family home in California. I planned to visit Canyonlands National Park, Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, The North Rim of The Grand Canyon, Valley of Fire State Park and Death Valley National Park to throw a pinch of ashes and say a word of tribute in each.

The Needles, Canyonlands National Park, Utah

I arrived at the Needles, Canyonlands National Park, in Southeastern Utah, at 2:00 A.M. after driving 450 miles from Boulder, Colorado. I found the campground and backed into a site nestled between house-sized rock domes and the stars. A brief stop in Moab, Utah at the City Market for some area guides confirmed what I remembered from the National Park Service website. Canyonlands is Utah’s largest national park, 35 miles Southwest of Moab, downstream from where the mighty Colorado River meets the Green River. The Green River and the Colorado River divide Canyonlands National Park into three districts: Island in the Sky, The Maze and The Needles. The meanders of the two rivers come to confluence and form essentially the shape of a giant lower case “y.” Moab and Arches National Park are on the tip of the right branch of the “y” and the center of the “y” where the rivers meet is the heart of Canyonlands. Island in the Sky, to the North between the branches of the “y,” is the easiest part of the Canyonlands National Park to access by car, with plenty of paved roads, parking lots, turnouts and scenic overlooks.

The Maze, Canyonlands National Park, Utah

The Maze, to the West of the confluence of the two rivers, is the most wild and remote of the districts of Canyonlands National Park. Art and his son A. C. Ekker guided Dad, Mom, photographers Parker “Ham” Hamilton and Dilly Hamilton and myself at age 2 1/2 into The Maze in 1968. For many years, I was the youngest person to ever ride horseback into The Maze and may be still. I rode in front of my mother in the saddle. Art and A. C. Ekker also ran the nearby Robber’s Roost Ranch that had been a stronghold for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Wild Bunch in the late 1800’s.  Today there are even hiking trails into The Maze but it takes a full day in a 4X4 vehicle just to get into this remotest part of Canyonlands National Park, The Maze proper. The literature and websites all recommend allowing an average of five to seven days for a trip even by vehicle. They also caution to go in well provisioned.

The Needles district to the South and East of the confluence of the two mighty rivers is partially accessible by car, but it is farther from the main highway on a half pavement, half dirt road. Dad made photographs in all three districts, but the Needles looked the most promising for a compromise between accessibility and being, as my dad would play on words, “Picture Skew.”

I crawled into my sleeping bag in my pickup camper shell at the campground in The Needles, Canyonlands National Park at around 3 a. m. after gazing at the stars and brushing my teeth at the water spicket. There were no campsites across the road from me and those on either side were empty. I was alone in the smell of sagebrush and wrapped in the dark desert night.

Nature’s Morning Show At Canyonlands

The next morning, or rather, later that morning just barely at first light, I awoke at 6:15 a.m., ready to go, not even tired. I noted that this or earlier was the time Dad would have awakened to photograph if he was still with me in body. As I rolled out of the camper shell, a panorama of red, brown, tan, orange and all colors in between splashed in horizontal bands across a collection of mesas, spires, hoodoos, domes and rock columns, stretching out before me in every direction. The glow of pre-sunrise dawn made me wish I had a camera. I woke up inside a Needles postcard. As I drove to the end of the campground, the sun crested the horizon. Nature’s show was on. It also dawned on me that this was the time Dad passed away.

As I drove with eyes taking in the splendor, knowing Dad and Mom would love this moment, I thought back to the morning of Dad’s passing two years prior, at the end of March in 2006. He was in the desert then too, but in very different surroundings. He was in a room on the Neurosciences Wing of Washoe Medical Center, now Renown Medical Center, in Reno, Nevada. I remember the overnight nurse assured me that if Dad died on her shift, she would see him start to take agonal breaths and call me. I had already been by his side a week and had read to him late into the night, but decided to get some sleep. He had already lasted a week in his post-massive stroke state, and I didn’t know when he might go.

Philip Hyde Climbs The Mountains For Their Good Tidings One Last Time

The nurse did call me but she said he had already slipped away without so much as a single agonal breath. He went easy in the very end. Perhaps he wanted to get out of that hospital bed and that body that didn’t work like it had so well most of his life. I imagined at the time that perhaps he left his body behind early in the morning to take a few last mental exposures of the beautiful snow-covered Sierra Nevada Mountains visible in the distance outside the hospital window.

Until he died, Dad often recited by heart two appropriate quotes by John Muir, “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.” Dad also had memorized this quote by John Muir, “I want immortality to read this terrestrial language. This good and tough mountain-climbing flesh is not my final home, and I’ll creep out of it, and fly free and grow.” I thought of those two favorites of Dad’s that he also published in his last book, The Range of Light, the name John Muir called the Sierra Nevada. Dad intended The Range of Light as a tribute to John Muir, Dad’s life-long inspiration, and to the Sierra Nevada, particularly Yosemite National Park, Dad’s spiritual home since age 16.

A quiet man slipped out of life softly. I was sad that I had missed the moment of death and that I had not been there for him. Though that was his way, he never called attention to himself or asked others to trouble about him. By the time I arrived at his bedside, about 15 minutes from getting the call in bed in my hotel room on the far end of the huge hospital campus, his face was already turning an off shade. As I sobbed, the nurses were reassuring that he went without any pain. Then I felt him. I felt something, maybe it was my imagination, but it felt like something more. I felt his joy at being free of that worn-out shell. I realized that he had left to “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings,” one last time. He flew free to see the sunrise and I found him gone just like I had 1,000 times before.

On dozens, perhaps hundreds of trips with him, throughout my life, I woke up and found him gone. He was typically gone out in the field taking photographs, starting much earlier than I usually awakened.  I woke up often to the smell of my mother’s breakfast cooking and her coffee brewing. That morning in Reno, I woke up and found Dad gone for the last time, probably carrying a 4X5 baby Deardorff camera as he soared over canyons and mountaintops, just like the famous Cartoon of Ansel Adams in heaven looking down on Half Dome and Yosemite Valley.

In The Needles, Canyonlands National Park, On The Slickrock Nature Trail

In Canyonlands National Park two years later, I woke up about the same time, at photography hour. How fitting, here I was in the heart of Canyonlands, at a short trailhead called Slickrock, no less. That was the name of Dad’s now collectible book with Edward Abbey in the renowned Sierra Club Exhibit Format Series that helped to expand Canyonlands National Park in 1971. For more on Edward Abbey, read the blog post, “Who Was Edward Abbey?”

“Slickrock, a general term for any bare rock surface,” the trail brochure said, “dominates much of the landscape in Canyonlands.” I remember Dad saying that there are dozens of places named Slickrock in Southern Utah and Northern Arizona. The slickrock my dad photographed Mom and me standing on for the title page of the book Slickrock, could be anywhere in this country but was near the entrance of Capitol Reef National Park, also in Utah. At the end of this Slickrock Trail in the Needles, I will be only a little over a mile from pavement, not much by Dad’s standards, but at least off the road.

Whew, it was already hot at 8 a. m. Fortunately, I found enough shade under an overhanging rock wall to stop and write more. I see the mesas of Island in the Sky to the North in the distance to the left of the La Sal Mountains on the horizon. The smell of Pinon pine, Juniper, sage and dust fill my nose, while the sandpaper of sandstone under foot catches the soles of my cross-trainers. The trail brochure map indicates that the trail ends out on a point where canyons on either side narrow the mesa. Once I made it out there, I ventured out on a side arm of the mesa. I scrambled out to the end where there is a stair-step down from the rim. I stood on the rim looking down probably 1,000 or more feet, though the next ledge of the stair-step jutted into space just three stories distance below.

Above Big Springs Canyon, In The Heart of Canyonlands

I sat near the edge to write more of this. This place was perfect for tossing my parent’s ashes—in the heart of Canyonlands—within sight of Grandview Point and Junction Butte to the North. Near the end of the sandstone mesa top, to my right, stood an ancient dead Juniper tree skeleton that looked like it belonged in a Philip Hyde photograph. I opened the ornate little pouch from India and the sealed plastic bag of ashes inside. It was quite still for the edge of a canyon, just a faint breeze. I reached into the bag, took a three-fingered pinch of ashes and flung them into the air over Big Springs Canyon.

“For all the generations to come,” I said, “a blessing and prayer for Ardis And Philip Hyde. Here’s to Canyonlands, birthplace of many beautiful photographs and memories.” As I sat down on the very edge with just my feet, not my legs dangling, part of my pinch of ashes must have caught an updraft and drifted high, far out over the canyon. Some of it may drift over the Southwest still; while a moment later I heard the heavier bone fragments hit the ledge below.

To read more about my personal experiences with my father see the blog post, “Memories Of Finally Working With Dad.”

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Posted in Excerpts of New Book

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Glen Canyon Portfolio 3

April 14th, 2011

Glen Canyon Portfolio 3

Photographer’s Comment From The Original Vintage Black And White Glen Canyon Portfolio

Continued from the blog post, “Glen Canyon Portfolio 2.”

By Philip Hyde

Cathedral In The Desert (Horizontal), Glen Canyon, Utah, 1964 by Philip Hyde.

(See the photograph full screen Click Here.)

My involvement with the Colorado Plateau province and its centerpiece, the Colorado River, began in 1951 when I was commissioned by the Sierra Club to find out and to photographically document what was in Dinosaur National Monument, particularly along the Yampa River and Green River, that would be impacted by the dams proposed in the Upper Colorado River Storage Project.

It was a tough assignment for a fledgling photographer whose only other exposure to the landscape of the Colorado Plateau province had been as a boy on a visit to Grand Canyon. My work up to that time had been in the well-watered forests and mountains of the Pacific Coast, and I was at first a victim of the landscape shock Dutton speaks of in his Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon Region. I had to learn how to cope, both physically and photographically, with the heat, haze, and dryness that dulled the mind, fogged the shadow, and made the distances disappear.

I needed more time to digest what I saw in the arid lands, and besides I still had a love affair going with mountains. It wasn’t until 1955 that I went back to accompany a Sierra Club group that floated the length of Glen Canyon from Hite to Lees Ferry. One of the high points of this trip, oddly enough, was the prelude, a two-day school bus ride around the canyon overland from Lees Ferry to the start of the river trip at Hite. The frustration of being imprisoned on a bus going through such radically different and beautiful country was so great that it etched that country in my mind and programmed me to spend the next twenty-plus years trying to find some of those retinal images that had rushed past too fast, unfixed on film. Leaving Lees Ferry we scanned the Vermillion Cliffs while climbing up the edge of the Kaibab, then the White Cliffs while climbing the Southern Utah plateaus; we then made the long descent down the slopes of Thousand Lake Mountain through Capitol Reef, past the soft gray shales of Caineville, into the deepening, sinuous White Canyon to Hite and the Colorado River.

In my memory of the river trip, nights on rocks radiating too much heat for sleeping are mingled with days of growing awe of the strange forms of this stone country. My awareness of water as a miracle was born in the shining trickles in canyon bottoms and the sudden springs that gushed out of rock as though piped through the water bearing Navajo Sandstone. These imprints went deep. This landscape took hold of me, in spite of physical discomforts and the initial visual strangeness.

An opportunity for a closer look at a piece of Glen came in the spring of 1962, when I joined a backpack expedition into Rainbow Bridge whose purpose was to study the possibility of building a small dam to prevent the reservoir’s waters from undermining Rainbow Bridge’s sandstone base.

Later, in June, I joined another float trip, this time with fewer people and a slower pace that provided better opportunities for making photographs. The collection made on this trip provided a majority of the photographs in this portfolio. A high point was climbing to the top of Rainbow Bridge at David Brower’s urging, with his climbing expertise to assure success.

Glen Canyon Dam was nearly finished at this point; a short time after the trip, the gates of the diversion tunnels were closed to begin the filling of “Lake” Powell.

Two years later, in 1964, I participated in a wake for Glen Canyon. Starting near the dam on two hundred feet of water, we floated over Music Temple and passed over the Great Overhang in Moki Canyon well known to river travelers, but now barely traceable by the top of its great curve. We boated through the narrows of Aztec Creek, floating over what had been a most beautiful stream junction, with small, sculptured pools in lovely curves linked by a trickle of water. Landing a short distance below Rainbow Bridge, we walked past groups of people in yachting clothes to pay our respects to the now domesticated bridge. We then returned to our raft to push out of the narrows past some small boats in a cove cowering from the howling gale roaring across the reservoir’s open water; such gales were unknown on the river with its high, sheltering walls. Oh, there were some healthy winds on the river, but they gave you a choice: if blowing downstream, you could continue; if blowing upstream, you found the nearest sandbar, made camp, and hoped the wind would abate after sundown.

Continuing up the stormy “lake,” we entered the Escalante arm, crossed its flooded lower reaches to Clear Creek while marveling at the sheer height of the canyon walls, and walked the remaining mile of canyon above slack water into the Cathedral in the Desert. This place was not drowned yet, but later that summer we learned that the water had come in for the first time and flushed out the floor, destroying the lovely rich green moss carpet the ages had furnished.

Investigating half-drowned Davis Gulch and Soda Gulch, we floated past half-submerged entrances, straining to imagine their lost beauty, up to the point where the boat grated on sand at water’s edge; then we walked up canyon as far as we could. In Soda we found the water lapping at the base of Gregory Natural Bridge, a named glory among uncounted, unnamed glories flickering out.

In subsequent trips to the Colorado Plateau province, I have passed the remnants of Glen Canyon to go on to happier places to walk and photograph. Somehow, the passing of Glen Canyon gave me a better reason to see as much of the province as I could, before all of it changed. These trips took me to the Grand Canyon, Navajoland, slickrock country – Escalante, Waterpocket Fold, Canyonlands – from the edge of the Great Basin to the feet of the Rocky Mountains.  Subconsciously I always kept looking for something as fine as Glen Canyon, holding my memories of Glen Canyon up to new country as a standard for color, sculpture, and fineness of detail.

My search confirms an early belief that Glen Canyon was one of the two grand climaxes of the land of the sediments, both born of the river. The other, kindred though quite different, but not less glorious, is Grand Canyon. One is flooded. The other, owing its life to the sacrifice of the flooded one, still lives.

To read an impassioned essay by Philip Hyde on the failings of the Glen Canyon Dam project see the blog post, “Lament For Glen Canyon By Philip Hyde 1.” To read about Canyonlands National Park and other areas of the land of sediments see the blog post, “Earth Day Celebration Of Ardis And Philip Hyde And Canyonlands.”

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Posted in Other P. H. Writings

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Monday Blog Blog: Lumiere Gallery Virtual Photography Fair

April 11th, 2011

Lumiere Gallery Of Atlanta, Georgia Features The Pioneer Western Photography Of Philip Hyde In A Virtual Photography Fair

Mt. McKinley/Mt. Denali, Reflection Pond, Denali National Park, Alaska, 1971 by Philip Hyde.

Lumiere Gallery began representing Philip Hyde just this year. Besides prominently displaying Philip Hyde’s images in online galleries and special shows, posting Philip Hyde’s biography online and showing original vintage black and white prints in the gallery, as well as offering color archival fine art digital prints, Lumiere Gallery also advocates for photography and helps to educate the photography collecting community through lecture sponsorship and other educational venues both online and off. To its further credit, Lumiere is already selling a significant number of Philip Hyde prints. Lumiere offers Philip Hyde’s original vintage black and white prints and color archival fine art digital prints as a special feature of the gallery’s Virtual Photography Fair.

See a selection of Philip Hyde photographs in Lumiere’s Virtual Photography Fair or visit Lumiere’s online lectures for collectors.

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Posted in Events-Releases

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Monday Blog Blog: Buzztail Blog Shakes And Makes A Difference

March 14th, 2011

California Quarter Image, Reverse Side, Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, 2005. First seen on PJ Finn's Buzztail Blog.

What is Monday Blog Blog? See the blog post, “Monday Blog Blog Celebration.”

NEW! Special Update: Buzztail Blog Has Added A New Writer

Greg Russell, author of the photo blog, Alpenglow Images, will lend his blog post writing skills to help PJ Finn develop Buzztail Blog…

Check out Greg Russell’s first Buzztail blog post, “Learning To Stand, Part I.”

What is Conservation Anyway?

Whether we are called conservationists, environmentalists, activists or some other term, a growing number of people both breathe air, drink water and want to maintain the quality of both for future generations. There are a certain faction of people in the United States who swallow the marketing and spin dished at them by big oil and big coal backed media. The spin says that we can continue to take old decayed organic material that we call oil and coal from deep in the earth, run it through refineries, machines and other hot devices, then spew it into the atmosphere indefinitely without any negative consequences. In my opinion, the idea that any negative consequences will be considered a theory until they have proven true, is ludicrous and nothing short of mass-suicide. The people swallowing and perpetuating the propaganda apparently have never ventured out into nature to observe the obvious signs of change all around us in every ecosystem.

Can Landscape Photography And Environmentalism Combine Well?

Meanwhile some photographers do not recognize the connection between landscape photography and the need to help preserve the land. Some photographers have also forgotten that landscape photography helped birth conservation in the 1800s. Nonetheless, many landscape photographers are aware of the tradition they are part of and are also rediscovering that photographs are one of the best tools available for making a difference. Because Global Warming has become so politicized and controversial, as have many other conservation and environmental issues, or for other good reasons, some photographers who are also great activists, choose to keep their photography and conservation efforts separate. My father pioneer landscape photographer Philip Hyde set himself apart by combining conservation and photography way before it was cool, hip and groovy to do so, but many other landscape photographers of note including Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter chose to separate the two endeavors to varying degrees. For more discussion on whether or not to mix conservation and photography see the blog post and comments on, “Wallace Stegner: The Wilderness Idea.”

PJ Finn, Photomontana Blog and Buzztail Blog

One photographer who is also an environmentalist is Paul Johnson, online a.k.a. PJ Finn. PJ Finn runs an insightful photography blog called Photo Montana, as well as a blog for activism, wilderness and environmental news called Buzztail Blog, which incidentally came before the photoblog. Buzztail refers to the noise a rattlesnake makes with its tail as a metaphor for what conservationists and environmentalists do when they report on and draw attention to various environmental issues. For more information about PJ Finn see his bio and the previous Landscape Photography Blogger blog post, “Photomontana Takes On Sacred Cows,” which recommends PJ Finn’s blogging on both blogs. Lately PJ Finn, after a move to Southern California, has rededicated himself to building up his Buzztail blog. Please lend PJ Finn a hand over there, stop by, make a comment, link to his blogs and otherwise offer up a big thanks to him for all of the good work he does.

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Monday Blog Blog: Ansel Adams In The National Parks

February 28th, 2011

Book Review: Ansel Adams In The National Parks: Photographs From America’s Wild Places

Highlights Of And About The Essays And The Photographs

 

Ansel Adams In The National Parks by Ansel Adams. Little, Brown and Company, 2010. Amazon.com price $22.72.

How to add to what other reviewers have said? Ansel Adams In The National Parks has been reviewed in a number of other venues online (see list of relevant posts below), which represents a sizable marketing and publicity outlay for Little, Brown and Company. Little Brown was kind enough to send me a review copy as a gift, thank you to Little Brown and the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust as well as the Center For Creative Photography. I imagine the other reviewers received advanced review copies to aid their review efforts too.

Below is what I like and dislike about this new release. I highly applaud the book and offer some criticism too. Ansel Adams in the National Parks: Photographs from America’s Wild Places (Amazon) is a beautiful addition to anyone’s library. The look and feel of this new volume about Ansel Adams, pleases the senses and says quality all the way, yet the book is reasonably priced at only $40.00. Considering the book displays “more than 225 photographs” and the reader discovers “many rarely seen and 50 never before published” Ansel Adams photographs. These facts alone make it worth owning. The new binding of  Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs, Ansel Adams In Color and Ansel Adams In The National Parks: Photographs From America’s Wild Places are all similar in attractive design and style: block lettering on white covers with smaller photographs on front and back.

In Ansel Adams In The National Parks I was happy to find many Ansel Adams photographs I have never seen before. The far majority of his photographs of the national parks in the book are a supreme joy to discover. There are perhaps half a dozen or less that I thought were below the standards of what Ansel Adams himself would have published. Ansel Adams was very particular about which of his photographs he printed and published. He printed only about 900 images out of his 50,000 original negatives.

I liked the notes and letters between Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall and Beaumont Newhall, when they either traveled together or wrote to each other about Ansel Adams’ travels and photography on his Guggenheim to photograph the National Parks.

I also enjoyed reading darkroom black and white photographer John Sexton on printing Ansel Adams photographs in the 1970s.

It is always a treat to read Wallace Stegner. His essays are well-informed and well-argued. As good as his essays are, his fiction is even better. Why not use new essays rather than reprints of essays published in previous books about Ansel Adams? Plenty of high quality credentialed essayists would love the opportunity to write about Ansel Adams in the National Parks.

The essays in the back of Ansel Adams In The National Parks, sing, especially the last essay by William A. Turnage “Ansel Adams, Environmentalist.” William A. Turnage’s prose is lyrical as he praises and passionately gives tribute to his life-long friend and partner. The two essays by Richard B. Woodward, “Ansel Adams In The National Parks” on the travels of Ansel Adams, Nancy Newhall and Beaumont Newhall and “Ansel Adams and the Preservation of Wilderness,” each provide a well-written and fascinating short history lesson. In “Ansel Adams and the Preservation of Wilderness”  Richard B. Woodward wrote:

As our sense of what happened yesterday or decades ago is often as muddled and contentious as our plans for the future, a mechanical process that provides more or less realistic evidence of the world as it once was can be of immense practical and political value…. Architecture historians in several European countries understood this vital function of photography soon after Daguerre took credit for inventing it in 1839. In France the government had already founded the Commission des Monuments Historiques in 1837 and assigned it to compile a list of old decaying medieval and Renaissance structures—cathedrals, parks, chateaus, villages—imperiled by neglect…. In 1851, the Commission selected five photographers—Edourd-Denis Baldus, Hippolyte Bayard, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, and O. Mestral—for an elite unite that operated under the name La Mission Heliographique. It was perhaps the first time, though by no means the last, that photographers were hired in a noble-minded effort to preserve valuable parts of the world, in this case a centuries-old heritage that France was in danger of forfeiting unless quick action was taken to save these crumbling and irreplaceable sites….

Richard B. Woodward continued with sections on how photographs helped protect Yosemite National Park, Yellowstone, and many other conservation causes all over the world. Then he wrote about Ansel Adams’ leadership in the transformation of photography and its establishment as an art form:

By organizing the exhibition Group f.64 in 1932—with Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and others—Adams became an eloquent spokesman for “straight photography” in San Francisco and far beyond….Finally no photographer except Stieglitz did more to win acceptance for photography as a fine art. In 1940, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York created a separate department of photography, the first in the world, Adams became one of its founding fathers. Without training as a scholar or curator, he was nonetheless instrumental in the rediscovery of Watkins, Jackson, and O’Sullivan. By extolling their achievements to Beaumont Newhall and others in the museum community, he helped to construct a nascent art historical continuum for landscape photography. His own international prominence as an artist toward the end of his life altered the material conditions for those choosing to take the medium in that direction. In the 1970s, prints by Adams became one of the pillars of an emerging market for photographs as an art collectible, for sale in galleries and auction houses. The select but not inconsiderable number of photographers lucky enough to earn a living today from sales of their prints have Adams to thank for proving this could be done. Despite an altered context and a newfound respect for photographers within the realm of contemporary art, his pictures remain basic to the photography market and show no sign of diminishing in prevalence twenty-five years after his death.

Related Posts:

“Ansel Adams In The National Parks” Ansel Adams Gallery

“Black And White Prints, Collectors And Philip Hyde” Fine Art Photography Collector’s Resource

“Ansel Adams In The National Parks” National Parks Traveler

“Ansel Adams In The National Parks” Travel Blissful

“Review: Ansel Adams In The National Parks” JMG Galleries

“Ansel Adams In The National Parks” Photonaturalist

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Monday Blog Blog: Lewis Kemper

February 14th, 2011

Master Landscape Photography And Photoshop Teacher Lewis Kemper

What in the world is “Monday Blog Blog? Find out in the blog post, “Monday Blog Blog Celebration.”

Backlit Icebergs, Jokalsarlon, Iceland, 2007 by Lewis Kemper.

After I wrote the blog post, “Monday Blog Blog: Photoshop For Pros,” I had a strange feeling that I had forgotten at least one or perhaps more professional photographers who are important to mention in any discussion about Photoshop or Photoshop training. Sure enough, one of those who I inadvertently left out was landscape photography master Lewis Kemper.

Lewis Kemper lived in Yosemite National Park for 11 years. From 1978 to 1980, he worked at the Ansel Adams Gallery. This gave him the opportunity to meet many influential photographers of the time including Philip Hyde. In the summer of 1979, Philip Hyde led the Color Landscape Photography Workshop for the Ansel Adams Gallery. His two assistant instructors were Jeff Nixon and Lewis Kemper.

“It was a dream come true to meet and teach under one of the photographers I had admired since I was a kid,” Lewis Kemper said. He continued:

I remember growing up looking at Sierra Club Books, Philip Hyde and Eliot Porter’s photographs, Navajo Wildlands, Slickrock, and the Sierra Club Calendars. Prior to Philip Hyde and Eliot Porter, landscape photography was limited to the big general scene. Eliot Porter sort of stole the title for ‘intimate landscapes’ but that was what I admired about Philip Hyde’s work too: the close-ups and the smaller and mid-sized scenes. Originally landscape photography was about trying to photograph everything. Now the Sierra Club photographers were showing us that you could take pictures of part of everything and still convey everything.

Part of what landed Lewis Kemper the job at the Ansel Adams Gallery was his B.A. in Fine Art Photography from George Washington University. In photography school, Lewis Kemper studied black and white photography and the zone system, but even earlier, starting in high school, he was more drawn to color. While helping Philip Hyde teach the Ansel Adams Gallery Color Landscape Photography Workshop, Lewis Kemper showed the lead instructor his Color Cibachrome prints of “Sand Dune,” “Cedars In Snow” and others. See more of Lewis Kemper’s photographs at LewisKemper.com.

“Philip liked my prints,” Lewis Kemper said. “He kept saying, ‘I can’t believe you’re getting this with a 35 mm camera.’” Subsequently, with a friendly push from Philip Hyde, Lewis Kemper began to use a large format 4X5 view camera. Listen to Lewis Kemper’s podcasts that mention Philip Hyde’s influence at the bottom of the page here. Later, in the early 1990s, Lewis Kemper bought an Imacon Scanner and began making high resolution digital scans of his 4X5 transparencies. He learned digital printing with the first 25 inch pigment printer, the Epson 7500. The Epson 7000 had been an ink printer, whereas with the advent of the Epson 7500, digital printers began using pigment. Lewis Kemper also printed commercially for other landscape photographers.

In 1992, Photoshop came out with version 2.5.1. Lewis Kemper said he remembered the instruction manual being very hard to follow. He said, “I had been screaming and struggling for 45 minutes with the clone tool and the instructions that came with Photoshop 2.5.1, when my wife came in to help. She started pushing buttons with the mouse and playing with the keyboard and all of a sudden the program cloned. I asked her, ‘What did you do?’ She said, ‘I don’t know.’ Then she tried to repeat the steps she had made when it cloned and it cloned again. Finally we had figured out how to make the clone tool work.”

Lewis Kemper began teaching photography workshops including Photoshop classes in 1995 at the Palm Beach Photographic Center, the same year Photoshop came out with version 3.0, the first version with layers. Read more of Lewis Kemper’s articles and tips: go here. When Lewis Kemper first started writing for PC Photo Magazine, he was using a small point and shoot digital camera, but through his work with the magazine he became enthusiastic to step up to a Canon 1DS, which had an 11 megapixel sensor. Lewis Kemper made his first serious digital capture with the Canon 1Ds in January 2004. He now represents Canon as one its Explorers of Light, an elite group of only 62 photographers around the world including Art Wolfe, Barbara Bordnick, John Paul Caponigro, Adam Jones, Robert Farber, George Lepp, Tyler Stableford, Rick Sammon, David Hume Kennerly and Douglas Kirkland. Lewis Kemper currently uses a Canon iPF 6300 24 inch printer and his two main cameras are a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III for landscape photography and a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV for wildlife and outdoor sports.

Lewis Kemper first taught classes through BetterPhoto.com in the Fall of 2003. He has also taught at the Santa Fe Workshops, Light Photographic Workshops, Aspen Workshops, and George Lepp Digital Institute. He is the author of The Yosemite Photographer’s Handbook, The Yellowstone Photographer’s Handbook and his latest Photographing Yosemite Digital Field Guide, which was voted in the top 20 of all such field guides. He also produces the acclaimed Photoshop training DVD’s, The Photographer’s Toolbox for Photoshop. His photographs have been published in numerous other books including those published by the Sierra Club, The National Geographic Society, Little and Brown, Prentice Hall and many others. Besides having his photographs appear on the cover of many of the best magazines, currently Lewis Kemper is a contributing editor for Outdoor Photographer and Digital Photo magazines and NANPA Currents magazine.

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Denali National Park, Alaska Travel Log 10

February 10th, 2011

Denali National Park, Alaska Travel Log: June 14-September 14, 1971 by Ardis Hyde

(Ardis, David and Philip Hyde in Their Camper. Continued from the blog post, “Denali National Park, Alaska Travel Log 9.”)

Part Ten: Layover at Bartlett Cove, Glacier Bay National Monument

Fairweather Range From Elfin Cove, Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, 1971 by Philip Hyde.

Sunday, July 4, 1971: Sure enough the sun was out when we arose, our first sunshine since the day we traveled from Ketchikan to Wrangle. See the blog post, “Denali National Park, Alaska Travel Log 4.” This side of the shore was shady and the dirt still cool, though the beach was in the sun. We ate breakfast at our beach kitchen with fire, shivering, but warmed up as we moved around and exercised. It was glorious to look across at Mt. Fairweather and see it all, with snow white summits left and right. We had a leisurely morning with Philip photographing in the Spruce Forest and around Black Pond. David and I puttered around the beach and the forest trail. We napped after lunch. All of us walked up the beach in the late afternoon. Lots of old beach lines were marked by dry blackened rockweed, caches of mussel shells and assorted flotsam. We found a perfect small crab skeleton for David’s “museum collection.” By then the sun was shining fully on our beach kitchen and we didn’t need to revive the fire. I cooked on the Svea stove.

We walked back along the nature trail to Glacier Bay Lodge for an 8:45 pm Park Ranger program of slides on Glacier Bay in general by Park Ranger Tim Setlicka. After the program we made reservations to go on a boat tour to Muir Inlet the next day. We talked with the Park Ranger again on our way back to camp. We then found new neighbors on both sides of us, with three parties total camped in our area. The newest neighbors were wetsuit divers and had already been in the water.

Landscape Photography Blogger Notes:

Why was Philip Hyde in Alaska? The Short Introduction

(More on the role of the photography of Philip Hyde in Alaskan conservation efforts in future blog posts.)

In his book, “Your Land and Mine: Evolution of a Conservationist,” Edgar Wayburn, president of the Sierra Club off and on in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, wrote of his experiences on his first travels in Alaska in 1967:

We soon found ourselves engrossed by conservation issues. Of most obvious concern was the damage caused by mining. About three miles northwest of Camp Denali, (just outside Denali National Park) hydraulic mining at Moose Creek had devastated the landscape. Huge areas of earth had been blasted away and piled high in waste mounds; rain had washed away the tailings onto land downstream. Mining had churned up so much soil that the river, once free running and clear, ran thick with brown mud… (Hydraulic mining) had been outlawed in California, but in Alaska it was allowed to continue full force. Even more pressing than the mines at Kantishna was the National Park Service plan to build a new hotel above Wonder Lake, just inside (Denali National Park’s) northern boundary. And at the eastern entrance to the park, the National Park Service was surveying sites to expand the existing hotel there…. At the time of Alaska’s statehood in 1959, fewer than a million of the state’s 375 million acres were in private hands…. Of the remaining lands, 290 million acres were considered unappropriated, falling under the administration of the Bureau of Land Management. The fate of the vast majority of Alaska had yet to be decided.

In 1967, there were 99 Sierra Club members in Alaska. The only other notable conservation organization in Alaska at the time was the Alaska Conservation Society. Edgar Wayburn and his wife Peggy Wayburn, who also held various leadership roles with the Sierra Club, began to rally people to the cause of wilderness conservation. They proposed an alternative site for the hotel that would not be destructive to the landscape, Mt. Denali views or wildlife ranges. Staff of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service arranged for Peggy and Edgar Wayburn to fly over the Kenai Moose Range, now the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge:

Oil had been discovered on the Kenai Peninsula a decade earlier, and we witnessed evidence of seismic research conducted by oil companies—large stretches of denuded land where the trees had been shaved so the companies could put in their seismic lines and test underground for oil reserves. Cook Inlet, which separates the Kenai Peninsula from the main bulk of Alaska, was dotted with oil rigs and derricks.

In Juneau, Alaska, the U.S. Forest Service had a different perspective. The U.S. Forest Service controlled all the land in Southeast Alaska, a coastal region of rain forests, fjords, islands and peaks as you have read about in previous blog posts in this series: see also, “Denali National Park, Alaska Travel Log 6.” Included in this domain, the Tongass National Forest, contained almost 17 million acres, the largest unit of the national forest system, and the Chugach National Forest consisted of over 5 million acres. The Forest Service was not intent on conserving forests, Forest Service leaders in Alaska, as often elsewhere, were committed to stimulating the economy, bringing in business and creating jobs through the pulping and milling of the old growth rain forests they managed. Edgar Wayburn began to research studies that had been done on potential wilderness areas. To his surprise, even after the Wilderness Act of 1964 mandated wilderness studies and they were ongoing throughout the lower forty-eight states, the Forest Service in Alaska had made no wilderness studies, even though they were sitting on by far the largest holdings of wilderness.

On their first trip to Alaska, Peggy and Edgar Wayburn’s last stop was Glacier Bay. Proclamation declared Glacier Bay a national monument in 1925, but its protections were limited and some of Glacier Bay’s most striking features were not included in the national monument. The many fronts of conservation battle in Alaska were developed and valiantly assailed with the help of Philip Hyde and other photographers. However, even with these efforts, Glacier Bay did not become a national park until 1980.

After Executive Director David Brower was forced into resigning from the Sierra Club, the Sierra Club no longer called their books the Exhibit Format Series. They adopted a new look to the books and a different size format. One of the first flagship books of the Sierra Club just after the Exhibit Format Series ended, was called “Alaska: The Great Land” by Mike Miller and Peggy Wayburn with a number of photographers including Philip Hyde as the primary illustrator. Sierra Club members and leaders used this book in the various campaigns to defend Alaska. In 1971, Philip Hyde’s summer photography trip with his family to Alaska, was an opportunity to make photographs of the areas sensitive to each environmental campaign. Philip Hyde also returned to Alaska the following summer in 1972 and also in 1973 and many years off and on afterward. Some of the photographs published in “Alaska: The Great Land” were made on the summer 1971 Denali National Park trip.

(More on the role of the photography of Philip Hyde in Alaskan conservation efforts in future blog posts.)

Continued in the next blog post, “Denali National Park, Alaska Travel Log 11.”

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New Release: “Yucca, Cholla, Granite Boulders, Joshua Tree National Park”

February 3rd, 2011

Now At New Release Pricing For A Limited Time: “Yucca, Cholla, Granite Boulders, Joshua Tree National Park, California, 1977″ Philip Hyde Authorized Special Edition Numbered Archival Fine Art Digital Prints

Philip Hyde only printed two 8X10 dye transfer prints of “Yucca, Cholla, Granite Boulders, Joshua Tree National Park, Mojave Desert, California, 1977.” The two dye transfer prints both sold in 1977. Now for the first time since 1977, “Yucca, Joshua Tree” is available as a fine art print again. Now at New Release Pricing.

The Making of “Yucca, Cholla, Granite Boulders, Joshua Tree National Park, California, 1977″

Yucca, Cholla, Granite Boulders, Joshua Tree National Park, Mojave Desert, California, 1977 by Philip Hyde.

(See the photograph full screen Click Here.)

In April 1977, by the time my mother Ardis Hyde, my father landscape photographer Philip Hyde and I made it to Joshua Tree National Monument, now Joshua Tree National Park, in our GMC Truck with Utility Body and Avion Camper, my mother wrote in her travel log that we had visited Alan Hoeny’s gallery in Tahoe City, which was successfully selling Dad’s prints. We also had scrambled on the rocks at the water’s edge at Lake Tahoe and watched the moon rise over Mono Lake. At Mono Lake Mom picked watercress for a salad from the stream flowing from under the Tufa Towers.

We stopped in Independence to see the Eastern California Museum, Dad photographed in the Alabama Hills and we watched the rising full moon make a partial eclipse while Mom read “A Tale of Two Cities” to us out loud. When we drove over Cajon Pass, it was the first time we had done so since the new freeway had obscured the old road. In San Bernardino Dad and I explored the railroad yards, large train station and defunct round house complete with a huge 2-8-8-2 Mallet steam engine on display.

At Anza Borrego Desert State Park we followed a track to a wash that looked solid and began to back in for good parking. The wash turned out to be soft under a solid crust and in a minute one wheel was stuck. It was about 6 pm and getting dark fast. Dad jacked up the camper and put plywood under the wheel. Soon we lurched about three feet forward and dug in again. It was too dark to see now, so Dad gave up until morning when he thought he would go for help. Mom fixed dinner and we slept in the camper leaning to one side.

The red sun rose at 5:30 am and “turned to apricot with the clouds responding in like colors as a big white full moon set on the other side of the sky. Dad had a good idea during the night to lay our rugs and duffle bags in the wheel path past the two plywood pieces. By 6:30 am we were out as the wheels rolled over the rugs and duffle bags perfectly. It was already hot when we reached the Palm Canyon parking lot at 6:30 am. Mom carried the lunch pack and Dad as usual lugged his 4X5 Baby Deardorf view camera on his wooden Reis tripod and his shoulder bag. Dad made picture stops right away. The flowers were gone but the Ocotillo was in bloom and the stream flowed with water bordered by lush grass and clover under the palm trees. The Birds sang abundantly. We ran across a large rattle snake in a striking twist on a rocky ledge “taking us in,” Mom wrote in the travel log. “He held his curvy pose for us to see him well. His most notable feature were the black and white bands at the base of his tale. We learned later that he was a Diamond Back Rattlesnake.”

Dad stopped many other times for flower photographs in Palm Canyon and after leaving Borrego Desert State Park on the way to Joshua Tree. We stopped at Haflin Date Grove for date milkshakes. At Joshua Tree we picked out a $2.00 campsite at Belle Campground. Most of the next day we explored around the campground area while Dad photographed wildflowers, boulders, Yucca and Joshua Trees. We then drove around on a survey of all the campgrounds from White Tank to Ryan and back to Belle Campground for an early stop at a nice spot with neighbors on only one side. I watched rock climbers scaling a wall while Dad photographed and Mom made cornbread. Mom’s log continued:

We left a marker at our campsite and drove to Live Oak. The Canterbury Bells bloomed in abundance among the rocks. David climbed the one big oak tree in the wash. We drove out the Queen Valley Road to the road head then walked over to Desert Queen Overlook and back in a few minutes. There was a cool breeze but the country was not very interesting in the light of noon day. After lunch we started out on foot to the Pine Springs area. We came into Pinion pines and Nolinas (related to Agave) in increasing profusion and various stages of bloom unfolding, from bud on the stalk to last year’s dry filigreed skeletons. At the huge boulder ridge after Philip made photographs of the boulders, we took the fork in the trail to the mine shafts. We followed the trail track to its end across country filled with attractive boulder lanes where there were other trail forks, eventually circling back to the camper and driving back to last night’s camp space we had reserved.

The following day proved less photographically productive again due to flat light. Mom finished reading “A Tale of Two Cities” at lunch.  In the afternoon we saw another type of rattlesnake that turned out to be a Mitchell’s rattlesnake with faint banding. We also saw a Rosy Boa near the path we set out on to explore. We walked through an area that had been recently burned and came to a surprising large amount of water in nice reflecting pools. Dad used up all but one sheet of film. He reloaded the next day before leaving for the Kelso Dunes. More on the Kelso Dunes and other Mojave Desert attractions of the 1977 trip in another blog post.

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Monday Blog Blog: Greg Russell, Ph.D.

January 31st, 2011

Monday Blog Blog: Greg Russell Of Alpenglow Images Raises A Family, Teaches, Grades Papers, Writes Papers, Blogs, Photographs, Photoshops, Shops, Plasticizes And More

Pines, Fog, Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park, California, 2009 by Greg Russell.

When I first started Landscape Photography Blogger, many generous photographers and other visitors commented on the blog posts I wrote, but rarely on the blog posts written by Dad that I republished from magazines, newspapers, travel logs, field notes and Dad’s books. For some time, blog posts by my father, though they enjoyed more traffic, did not receive as many comments. Now that has changed.

One day a young man came by and made a comment on Dad’s front notes I had re-published here from my father’s book Navajo Wildlands: As Long As The Rivers Shall Run in the ground-breaking Sierra Club Books Exhibit Format Series. The series of three blog posts named after Dad’s piece starting with, “Toward A Sense Of Place 1” is especially poignant and illustrative of Dad’s philosophy with which I was lucky enough to grow up. The young man, Greg Russell, also made a comment on my “About The Blog Author” page. His comments were insightful and showed that he himself had a strong conviction about wilderness and a profound connection to the land. I was impressed and I went to Greg Russell’s blog, Alpenglow Images, to take a look at his photographs. His images were beautiful, many of them perhaps a bit too much so in that they looked to me to be similar to a lot of other work I had seen. He had a slightly different twist on “Mesa Arch” in Canyonlands and on the sand dunes in Death Valley, some waterfalls, some sunsets. Regardless, he and I struck up an online friendship based on his excellent comments that make a consistent contribution on this blog.

Photography can in some ways be rife with elitism. Some photographers are the most generous and helpful people you will ever meet. Some are arrogant, cliquish and exclusionary to outsiders. One time I heard the story of an aspiring landscape photographer having a friendly talk with another landscape photographer. The veteran photographer, who claimed to be well-known (I’ve never heard of him) as soon as he found out the newbie made his living from another source other than photography, practically ended the conversation in mid-sentence. This same photographer had gone on and on about how he had first made the plunge into being a full-time photographer. Eventually the listener to these great tales of heroism asked, “Well, how did you do it? What did you actually do to bring in the bacon while you were getting started?” It turns out the arrogant photographer confided that his wife had a rather large trust fund. This is the classic story. Many, many people, more and more all the time, buy their way into being full-time in photography, rather than beginning part-time and working on a shoestring. Yet those who already have their place successfully bought and paid for, have the audacity to look down on those who are still learning. Wait a minute, I thought that was everybody? I guess not. Some people know it all already.

Greg Russell started part-time and built up his photography the old-fashioned way. It started as a hobby and progressed to what his wife Stephanie now calls, “A serious addiction.” Should we all hold hands and look down on Greg Russell because he is part-time? It would be a grave error to do so. Out of all photography blogs I have yet seen, he is the one whose work has most improved over the year that I have observed his photography. His voice and vision are starting to shine and he has a strong one of each, I assure you.

In case you may imagine that his only talent is photography, he also has a family: his wife and a boy of three so far. Besides making photographs, helping with the kid, blogging and processing photographs, he also is completely inundated each evening with tests and papers to grade, lectures to plan, and papers he is working to get published. Greg Russell in his other life has a Ph.D. in Biology with an emphasis in Animal Physiology. He teaches at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Orange County, California. He lives in Riverside. If you know the area, you know that is a bear of a commute too. He also happens to be the director of the Plastination Lab on campus. “Plasti-what?” You say. Plastination is the process of preserving animal creatures or part of them in plastic for further study, research and teaching. He plastinated a group of brains, no joke, for the Arizona Science Center in Phoenix. For that display his lab embalmed, dehydrated in acetone and permeated with polymer, a fancy way of saying they petrified the stuff with plastic, a brain from a monkey, a rat, a sheep, a cat and a rattlesnake, whose brain is only the size of a fingernail. So when they say that rattlesnakes don’t bite lawyers out of professional courtesy, it truly is an insulting joke. I guess there is no joke for full-time photographers who look down on part-time photographers. Maybe their brains have already been through Greg’s lab. Greg Russell, Ph.D. and his lab also not long ago plastinated a five foot long Humboldt Squid, one of only a few others in the world.

Go see his photographs. You will not regret it. His blog is loaded with well-thought-out and well-written posts about photography of well, er, um Alpenglow, one other subject I need to clear the air about. I will leave you with a comment I made on Greg Russell’s blog post, “Two Saints.”

These are both beautiful photographs. I like the subtle pinks, blues and purples. I had an interesting conversation the other day with Gary Crabbe about photographer influences, “magic hour” and alpenglow. As you may know, he started as a photographer working for Galen Rowell. Anyway, I wrote a comment that I thought might offend him. I said that I thought his sunset images were more profitable than of high quality like his other photographs. He is a very nice guy and a long-time professional photographer. Apparently he was not offended at all. He did make an excellent point in defense of photographs of Sierra and other mountain alpenglow with just the tips lit up, reminiscent of Galen Rowell’s work. He said that many people became photographers because of Sierra sunsets and sunrises. He also said that while they had been done before, many photographs of high mountain lakes with peaks reflected cause him to feel nostalgic about some of the best memories in his life of being in the high Sierra. How could I disagree either with the logic or with the argument put across with such a winning charm and kind voice? I couldn’t and I can’t because some of my best memories of my life are of mountain sunsets and sunrises when I think about it. So you keep on doing your mountain alpenglow. I no longer consider myself a detractor, especially since I see in much of your later imagery a solid attempt and success at capturing something a bit different and unique. Try to keep doing that too. Best wishes my friend.

Keep your ears tuned and eyes peeled for Greg Russell’s new blog posts. He will probably tell you more about why he called it Alpenglow Images himself. To get you started on Greg’s philosophy, read about his interesting process of how he re-designed his artists statement in his post, “(Re) Alignment,” or read his artists statement itself. For a more complete idea on his approach to photographing wilderness, see his blog post right here on Landscape Photography Blogger, “Moving Past The Repertoire.” Any of his material will drive you on in your own quest for affinity with nature and for the quintessential landscape photograph. Happy trails.

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