Newsletter February 2010

After a couple of months of few deadlines and a rather empty to-do list, things are starting to pick up around here as I am completing a couple of new projects, beginning to get ready for summer art shows, and getting out some more exhibition proposals. Here are some highlights of recent and current events.

In my free time this winter, I've been out shooting a lot of crows and ravens. Not literally shooting them of course but taking their photographs. If you are a follower of my POTD posts (Picture of the Day) you've been seeing some of these photos from time to time. I find these sometimes maligned and sometimes revered birds quite fascinating. I like photographing them in winter as the snow makes for a good high contrast background. (Of course I have some problems with too much of a good thing; the high contrast of dark black birds against a bright white background can be difficult to deal with in the processing stage.)

Photographing birds is a new challenge for me, definitely not the type of work I'm used to doing. Besides dealing with the technical issues of shooting sometimes fast moving subjects with a long telephoto lens, I'm learning how to best approach crows and ravens in specific situations in order to get good photos without scaring them off. I've found, for example, that those in urban areas are much easier to approach than those in the country. In either case, they are of course most likely to be found near food sources. So, outside of town I've been spending more time than usual parked near road kill while in town I've been stalking dumpsters behind restaurants. There is a gang (or should I say murder) of crows in Bozeman that seems to know when it's lunchtime at McDonald's and appear there every day around 11:00 a.m., queuing up to help keep the parking lot clear of garbage when the noon rush starts. Even in these less than stellar locations, I've been able to get what I think are some pretty evocative images.

I'm working on producing two affordable folios of images of crows and ravens. Each will consist of a set of approximately ten images in a presentation folder (very similar to those sold by Lenswork magazine, if you are familiar with how they market some of their products). Look for them on my internet store in the next couple of months.

I recently completed a small book of photographs from my collection of grain elevator images and it is now available for purchase in my internet store. This book was designed to be a companion publication to my traveling exhibit Elevations. Twenty-six of my favorite images from the exhibition along with a short introduction are presented in the 8”x10” book.

This is not a press-printed book; instead it is a bound collection of actual high-quality duotone photographic images printed on Fuji Crystal Archive photo paper, a profession quality paper with a high dynamic range and excellent resistance to fading. The photographs are bound in a laminated hard cover using a lay-flat binding process that facilitates viewing of the images.

The March issue of Color magazine with the Spotlight article on my work has been on the newsstand now for a month or so. I'm not sure when it will be replaced by the next issue, so if you'd like to take a look, now is the time. While your browsing the magazine, be sure to take a look at Angela Bacon-Kidwell's article as well. I love her dreamy, moody, borderline spooky imagery. She's even got a couple of photos with crows in them.

One of the images from my Color magazine article, Un, (which I featured in my last newsletter but will repeat here), is also set to appear in the premiere issue of a new magazine, The Photo Paper, being launched by World Photographic Arts.

I'm not the only one that publishes a picture of the day or POTD. The Smithsonian Magazine posts a POTD (they call theirs photo of the day) on their Arts and Culture web page. They choose their photos from those submitted to their annual photography contest. For January 29, 2010 they selected one of my photos, Leaf Still Life for their POTD. I like to think this counts has having my work hung at the Smithsonian--not quite, but maybe someday!

The Sun is an independent, ad-free monthly magazine that for more than thirty years has used words and photographs to invoke the splendor and heartache of being human. The Sun celebrates life, but not in a way that ignores its complexity. The personal essays, short stories, interviews, poetry, and photographs that appear in its pages explore the challenges we face and the moments when we rise to meet those challenges.

Regardless of whether or not my work appears there eventually, it is a magazine worth checking out. I have seen it occasionally at bookstores like Barnes and Noble and Borders, in the literary/art magazine section.

I want to end this newsletter issue by pointing out an interesting web site I came across recently, that for photographer Matt Stuart. Matt is a street photographer in London who has a wonderful eye for quirky compositions of people (dogs, ferrets, and rabbits too) that just makes me smile. Kind of like Heri Cartier-Bresson with an elevated sense of humor. By sheer coincidence, I happened to be listening to John Prine's Big Old Goofy World when I was going through Matt's color photos. In its own quirky way, that song turned out to be very appropriate background music for Matt's photos.