Owlscapes

What if you made landscape images and put owls at their center, in fact, what if you let the owl, by its location, more or less determine the framing of the image? You’d be making landscape images, yes, but messy…

Your Rugs Are Trying to Kill You

Public service announcement: Get rid of your rugs. On April 18, as I was about to leave the house to photograph two owl chicks that my wife had spotted near the elementary school in our neighborhood, my right foot caught…

What Do We Call AI-Photography?

We need a name for this new thing, this new way of generating photo-realistic images. That name sure isn’t “photography.” There is a great outcry amongst the Twittering masses over this question, every photographer now a philosopher, ontology replacing cryptocurrency…

Landscape Words and a Fellow Traveler Teaches

From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry LopezPublished in 2023 by the Sheldon Museum of Art (at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment Review written during the rainstorms of early…

Creative Destruction of the Creatives

There is nothing that computers can do that humans can’t do themselves, with pencil and paper, if only we were given enough time. At a low enough level computation is mind-numbingly dumb. There’s no ghost-in-the-machine hiding down there. But there…

Random Frame (Barry Lyndon)

When I was a teenager I had the flu and I woke up during the night, right about two in the morning, and I went downstairs to watch a little TV. I thought I’d sit there for a bit and…

To the Top of Cima Dome

The hike up to the peak of Cima Dome is not long from the off-road trail that runs along the side of Tuetonia Peak but it is misleading. I parked my FJ Cruiser in a small campground turnout and looked…

Random Frame (2001: A Space Odyssey)

Stanley Kubrick was a photographer first and then a filmmaker but he was always a photographer. He worked for Look Magazine, like Life but not nearly as famous or remembered today, and he started making images for them while still…