Welcome to my Blog
Welcome to the first of a continuing series of blogs on photography and the Canyonlands. Almost forty years ago, I was an Iowa college student attending classes and playing in rock bands, but returning every night to an apartment covered with maps of Canyonlands and Arches on the walls and with a horde of backpacking and camera equipment in the closet. What a long, wonderful trip it’s been. Even as Moab gets busier and more frantic, and more like a city than the tiny town I moved to in 1975, I get up every morning and look at the 2,000 foot cliff behind my house and the sun streaming out from behind the La Sals and thank my lucky stars I was able to spend my life here.I’ll assume you don’t know me, so I’ll start with a short resume that puts forth my qualifications for this job. I think I was the first local photographer (with the exception of my friends Frank Mendonca and the late Fran Barnes) to seriously pursue photographing the Canyon Country and to make it my life’s work. My knowledge of the area, the result of over thirty years of hiking, boating, and jeeping is not encyclopedic, but it’s large. I sold my first stock image in 1980, and we estimate that we are approaching 80,000 image sales since that time. I have authored or coauthored over thirty books with three to appear in 2008. My Moab Gallery is entering its 11th season. In 2006, I was awarded the North America Nature Photography Association’s Fellow award for over twenty years of achievement in nature photography. I also have a degree in English, so I can write at least tolerably well. My thinking is that the subject matter for this blog will be broad, covering everything from the local photography scene, equipment for the field and the darkroom (digital and otherwise), local news that impacts photographers, personal rants, the outdoor photography lifestyle, and countless other subjects with a Moab/photography nexus. I hope to include material about all kinds of Moab photography, including people, lifestyle, and adventure genres. I also intend to discuss the good ways to approach some of the scenic icons of the area with a camera. I may even give away a few secrets. Why? Compared to the other land users out there, photographers are pretty benign. I don’t want to send a horde of people into a fragile area, but I do want more people to come to love and enjoy this area–hoping they’ll raise their voices to defend the canyons, rivers, mesas, and mountains and the living things that inhabit them. My other ulterior motive is, of course, to get you to stop at my store on Main Street and look around. I do have kids in college, after all. Though I apologize that I’m hardly ever there (I still spend a lot of time in the field), there’s lots of stuff to interest landscape photographers of every stripe. Otherwise, I’ll see you on the trail.
