The Great Backyard Bird Count is a global citizen science project managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the world’s leading research center and authority on birds and bird habitat. Birdwatchers around the globe use the smartphone apps E-Bird and Merlin ID to report their observations and sightings over a long weekend each February at the…
Set among the towering, ancient rain forests and rugged coastline of the Pacific Northwest, Olympic National Park perfectly represents both the harsh cultural conflicts surrounding conservation of public lands, and the negotiated compromises required for the ethos and values of the national park system to survive and flourish going forward. It’s one of the most beautiful…
Each spring during their annual migration, fantastic sedges of Sandhill Cranes settle in for a few weeks at the confluence of the South and North forks of the Platte River in central Nebraska, on their way north to their summer nesting grounds. Hundreds of thousands of these large and noisy birds spend their days scavenging in…
What is it in the bones of everyday photographs, that give them the power to tell a forgotten story from another time and place with such clarity and imagination? And why, in the imagined visual telling of the story, do those photographs elevate the people and their tales of ordinary life, to an almost mythic status?…
Beyond the incredible innovations and creative possibilities of Polaroid cameras and their wonderful instant film, my most nostalgic photographic memory is of the Old-Fashioned Photo Booth. Selfies before Selfies were cool. A Memoir in a Can. Four for a Dollar. Extra Charge for Color. Here’s a few sets of old friends in faraway times, stashed in…
Looking through our family’s photographic archive and trying to select images for my wife’s memorial service, I was struck by the power photography has over the way our brains process old memories fading with the passage of time. Small moments from years earlier shine with an intensity that brings forth a flood of contradictory emotional connections…
Part documentary photographic essay and part studio construction, the photographic collage is an interesting hybrid artifact. Particularly with the use of film negatives and prints, the process took on a challenging, almost accidental quality. The result could be mundane, disastrous, or the definition of the synergy of the creative art studio. The scale of the assembled…
This dialogue was recorded on a cross-country tour a few of years ago, on the final day of our journey as we cruised through Yellowstone National Park. We spent most of our two days in the park replacing a tire after a dramatic high-speed blowout on the highway. The park was insanely crowded with traffic and…
Artists and photographers have used the Tryptich format for centuries to reinforce themes and refine their formal presentations. Related images and motifs have a revealing dynamic within the context of the work overall, and can clarify or obscure an artist’s concept. It’s an excellent tool to expose previously unseen elements and encourage an improvisational approach to…