Although it’s sometimes in conflict, my art photography has been greatly influenced by journalism.

Not only because journalism is the center of my career, but because so many of the photographers who have influenced me are photojournalists. Mostly, that’s been a good thing.

In the days when I shot black-and-white film with a Pentax K1000 and did the developing and printing myself, I learned from my visual colleagues the importance of telling a story – simply, clearly, in a single image.

The principles they taught me about composition and lighting are still in my head and my trigger finger.

This sequence of photos was shot in the Chattahoochee National Forest during a prescribed burn earlier this month.

What I tried to capture, besides the basic visuals of the fire, was the calmness with which it happened. Thousands of acres burned without unintended loss to life or property.

Lance Creek, Chattahoochee National Forest, on Thanksgiving Day. Temperature in the high 60s, and lots of vegetation has died off, giving easier access to view spots on the creek.

This HDR was created by layering and blending two exposures, with the SketchBook app on my iPad2.

I made minor adjustments afterwards in Lightroom.

You might call these photos a self-portrait.

Before my father died, he gave me the family camera – the first camera I ever used. It’s a Polaroid 360 Land Camera, bought in 1969, when I was 10 years old.

The flash unit had quit years before, but Dad was pretty sure the camera still worked. I bought a couple packs of Fuji film for the Polaroid – and then the whole project sat in my closet for almost four years.

Last week, inspired by some experimental photos that I saw online, I decided to dig out the camera. Loading it and getting the film to pull out without jamming took me awhile. Then the first six photos I took with the color film were solid black. I finally figured out how to change the battery controlling the electric eye, and got a few shots. Nothing worth posting here, yet.

But, in trying to remember what it is that makes Polaroids special, I studied the film emulsion on those all-black shots.

As I began to turn and fold the print, bent light caught my skin tones, the camera body, the overhead lamp … and creased them into abstract shapes.

I got out my Pentax K10D and started shooting.

I shot many hundreds of photos in Bali. It was another of those places where we rested from the stress of work, and where the quality of light made me look very closely at details.

These are my favorites.

The main reason for snorkeling in the Conasauga River was to see the fish. But I also watched the floating biodebris, imagining how a fish would look for food on the surface of the water.

This set is from the snorkeling trip of July 9 and a swim in a creek July 16.

I spent the weekend in Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, North Carolina – not to look at old growth trees, as the forest is known for, but to study flowers.

[This was part of a series of workshops on Appalachian plants offered by BotanoLogos school in Mountain City, GA.]

I brought along my 1980s telephoto zoom macro for my Pentax K10D (A series, 70-210 mm), and fell in love with it all over again. It’s a terrific piece of glass, and despite its weight, my lens of choice for shooting wildflowers.

In Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, you can’t help recall the lines in that sticky-sweet verse: “….a poem as lovely as a tree.”

These trees, or what’s left of them, inspire rage in environmentalists. The story is this: Huge hemlocks, diseased by wooly adelgid, were in danger of falling across hiking trails. Rather than chainsaw the trees, the forest authorities decided to dynamite them.

That may sound strange, but the idea was that well-formed snags would be left behind, rather than stumps. Snags are helpful to certain birds and their web of dependencies, so it seemed a novel solution to the sad problem of dying hemlocks.

Unfortunately, the crew hired to do the work did not trouble themselves to climb up the hemlocks and plant the dynamite at a high level. Instead, they blew the trees up at the base, defeating the entire purpose.

Nonetheless, I found the jagged shapes visually compelling. They seemed like frozen explosions, the burst of shattered wood left in an exaggerated cartoon.

These are my early (2004) experiments with digital manipulation. I was working with a 1.2 megapixel Cybershot and I was enthralled by the details it showed me.

I post these not because I think they’re great, although there are aspects of them that I like very much. This post is more of a tribute to how digital imaging and Photoshop filters helped me to find and explore patterns in simple seashells. My camera became the way that I saw.

In honor of the need to play with new mediums, here is my first audio piece done on Garage Band. I made it on my 52nd birthday, today.

It’s an arrangement of a very simple tune that many over-40 Americans might recognize: “Sandman’s Near” from the John Thompson piano book Teaching Little Fingers to Play.
The twist is that, when you’re 52, falling asleep is not as simple as when your fingers and brain are little.

Swimming with the underwater camera, Pentax Optio W90 – in Jamaica.

The colors were not enhanced.

In 2009, I did a whole blog on the subject of a single American beech. It was a lot of fun in the springtime, watching things change. But somehow the subject exhausted itself before fall. I think that I didn’t know enough about botany then.

And also, I went back to work in Afghanistan, so my attention was too scattered to focus on this one subject. But I’d like to return to it someday.

You can read and see the original “To See A Tree” by clicking here.