The Art Of Visual Storytelling

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What makes your images yours is your point of view. To find your voice tell your story.

Plan Your Story

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Every picture tells a story.

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Focus your creative efforts and create an action list to achieve your goals.

Developing Personal Projects
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What kinds of visual reminders would be helpful to you?

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The Benefits Of Selecting Your Top Images
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Look for the ways you approach making photographs and think visually.

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Bodies of work add depth to and extend ways of seeing.

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7 Benefits Of Returning To Locations
With so many wonderful places, why return to the same location more than once?

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Continuity lies at the heart of the art of storytelling.

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My Top Images Of 2019

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01_20190922_GRNsydkap_593-Edit copy

Constellation

Constellation XLI

Constellation

Constellation XXXVII

Constellation

Constellation XLVII

Constellation

05_20190917_GRNvestfiord-Edit_1304

Constellation

06_20190918_GRNrodeisland_228-Edit

Revelation

07_20190918_GRNrodeisland_373-Edit

Revelation

08_20190919_GRNrodeisland_672

Revelation

This is a selection of my top images of 2019.
Check back later – there will be some late entries.
This selection doesn’t reflect sales, publication, or activities on the web. It simply reflects my opinion.

Geography

The locations include Antarctica, Scoresbysund Greenland, Iceland, and Namibia.

Process

Continuing the momentum from the previous year’s experiments I combined more images from the Hubble telescope (in the public domain ) with my own exposures, expanding my series Constellation with new images of deep space as well as stars observed with the naked eye.

Fog and glassy smooth waters in Scoresbysund Greenland offered surprise “straight” additions to my series Revelation. There are many other successful exposures waiting to be finished as composites. The images I released in 2019 all have a primal quality, a felt sense of being in the presence of another consciousness.

Concepts

Ideas about a living earth have been expanded to a living universe.

Where images in my Land In Land series present married views of the same land in both an overview and a detail seen by looking very closely, images in Constellation present married views of lands and the stars that surround them offering a glimpse into deep space and time. What’s beyond the object, behind the surface, and perhaps even within it shows through.

Magic Moments

We had ten straight days of full sunshine in Antarctica. Amazing!

Still waters and thick fog persisted for several days in Greenland’s, Scoresbysund.

Standing out the door on the rail of a helicopter above Icelandic rivers was thrilling.

It was a very productive year; more than 75 new works released; more than 150 new studies made.

It’s challenging to choose so few images from so many – but it’s insightful. Try selecting your own top 12 images. Try selecting the top 12 images of your favorite artist(s).

View more of my Annual Top 12 Selections here.
View more images in my ebooks here.
View my full Works here.
View my Series videos here.
View new images in my newsletter Collectors Alert.

New Photographic Studies Of Maine's Rocky Coast

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01_IMG_7830 02_IMG_7832 03_IMG_7833 04_IMG_7881 05_IMG_7872 06_IMG_7877 07_IMG_7878 08_IMG_7879 09_IMG_7862 10_IMG_7831 11_IMG_7882
Wherever I go I explore the world visually with a camera. Sometimes this is during a walk. Sometimes this is during a workshop. Other times it’s while I’m making a body of work. You might think it distracting to think about one thing while you’re doing another but I find that working on two different ideas at the same time often leads to a fertile cross-pollination. I find new ideas this way.
Of course, you’ve got to stay flexible. Recently, while I was leading a photography workshop in Maine’s Acadia National Park I went looking for the cairns so many visitors leave behind. I don’t like them in public lands, because when I go there I want to be able to experience the land uninterpreted. Still, I appreciate the playful contact people have with the land when they make cairns. So to work on my ambivalence I started making art out of the cairns. But this time, they weren’t there. I was pleasantly surprised and a little disappointed, which also surprised me. So I started to make my own cairns to photograph, intending to scatter them before I left, and never got to it because the first two stones I picked up were all I needed that day. The relationships between them and their environment were much richer than I expected. It felt like arranging still lifes, which I did for hours – and I’m sure I’ll do it again.
These studies relate to my series Alignment.
View my Maine Cairns studies here.
View my studies of Maine Artists here.
View more studies of Maine here.
Find out about my Maine fall photography workshop here.

Land In Land – When Studies Turn Into Finished Works

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LandInLand_XXV
For years I’ve used my iPhone as a sketchbook to play, make images more spontaneously, and explore ideas. I’ve always been fascinated by how the tools we use change our perception. Yet, knowing it wasn’t the tool that made the difference between a study and a finished work, I’d been challenging myself to create a series of images with my iPhone that had as much depth of content and feeling as the images I’ve made with cameras that make higher quality files. Land In Land is the first series I’ve done this with. Here’s a quick look at how it developed.
LandInLand_I
I knew I was onto something when I saw this first image in New Zealand.
I got confirmation that the idea could be sustained with this second image.
LandInLand_II
I found that meaningful variations could be found in other locations like California.
LandInLand_XXXVI
This process of discovery was repeatable in Utah.
LandInLand_LXVI
LandInLand_LIX
LandInLand_LIII
This new way of seeing finally became intuitive for me, leading to increased productivity in Spain.
LandInLand_LXXXIV
LandInLand_LXXVII LandInLand_LXXXII
LandInLand_LXXIX LandInLand_LXXXIX
My mother (an artist, a picture editor, a designer) has an exceptional eye. When she asked for a print of this last image and hung it near a prized Tibetan tanka, it was confirmation for me that I’d achieved a real depth that carries through to others.
View the suite of images from Maine here.
View the video here.
Listen to the statement here.

My Top 12 Photographs Of 2018

Images - Annual Top 12 Comment

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Constellation

Antarctica

Land In Land LXXIX

Land In Land LXXXIX

Land In Land LXXVI

Land In Land LIII

Land In Land LXXVI

This is a selection of my top 12 images of 2018. This selection doesn’t reflect sales, publication, or activities on the web. It simply reflects my opinion. Click on the titles to find out more about each image.

Geography

The locations include Antarctica, Spain, Arches National Park, Scoresbysund Greenland, and Maine.

Process

Continuing the momentum from the previous year I completed my first seriesof finished works with my iPhone – Land In Land. Processing images on location, sometimes seconds after making exposures, is a gamechanger. Even more interesting is the sense of seeing the image better at arm’s length, allowing me to see the composition and the subject simultaneously.

I was pleasantly surprised when another experiment worked as I combined images in the public domain from the Hubble telescope with my own exposures, expanding the images in my series Constellation to add images of deep space to those of stars observed with the naked eye.

Concepts

I continue to explore presenting many moments in time simultaneously to see one aspect of land through another. In more recent work, the detail and the overview are united in a single integrated experience. As ever, what’s behind and beyond shows through.

My use of abstraction has expanded from minimalism to include more complex maximal patterns.

Magic Moment

Perhaps the most sublime moments were found in Greenland’s, Scoresbysund, as the weather shifted to winter conditions creating dramatic katabatic winds and unusual ice conditions found only at the beginning of the season. Being on the only boat (a three-masted schooner built in the early 1900s) in the fiord system heightened the sense of adventure.

It was a very productive year; more than 75 new works released; more than 150 new studies made.

It’s challenging to choose so few images from so many – but it’s insightful. Try selecting your own top 12 images. Try selecting the top 12 images of your favorite artist(s).

Enjoy These Images From Greenland's Sublime Scoresbysund

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Enjoy this selection of images from Scoresbysund, Greenland.
These images are selected from three ongoing series – Revelation, Constellation, and Contrail.
View more images from Greenland here.
Find out more about my Greenland workshops here.

New Images From Spain & Portugal

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See new images from Spain and Portugal in my social networks.

Instagram

Facebook

Twitter

View new prints during my 2018 Open Studio event.

My Top 12 Images Of 2016

Destination - Greenland, Images - Annual Top 12 Comment

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This is a selection of my top 12 images of 2016. This selection doesn’t reflect sales, publication, or activities on the web. It simply reflects my opinion. Click on the titles to find out more about each image.

Geography

While I visited most of the biomes in one year (all seven continents in 18 months), the images I released were drawn primarily from the artic and antarctic regions.

Process

Straight images from Antarctica were processed on location, mostly in Lightroom. Composite images were created in studio, mostly in Photoshop after launching from Lightroom. I date “straight” shots based on the date they were exposed and composites on the date they are completed.

Concepts

I focussed on a long-standing theme, creating symmetries drawn from the land to better reveal the spirit within. The final resolution has prompted me to remaster many related files made in 1996. I released multiple related series of studies, including a series of digitally rendered inkblots.

Magnificent Moment

There was big magic in 2016! In Antarctica there were moments of extreme quietude amid the lifting fogs at Black Head and the glassy reflections in Antarctica’s Plenneau Bay. We experienced the epically varied lands of New Zealand; in one day we moved from a waterfall strewn fiord, through a rainforest, up to a high arid plateau, and finally to the base of a glacier. Sublime light filled hours and hours, as we flew helicopters over Namibia’s Sossusvlei dune fields, which roll out to the Skeleton Coast. All of these adventures were long-held dreams come true.

It’s challenging to choose so few images from so many – but it’s insightful. Try selecting your own top 12 images. Try selecting the top 12 images of your favorite artist(s).

View more of my Annual Top 12 Selections here.

View more images in my ebooks here.

View my full Works here.

View my Series videos here.

View new images in my newsletter Collectors Alert.