Imagine a painter—say, Georgia O’Keeffe—staring into a blank canvas. Working from an image in her mind’s eye, she steps to the canvas and sketches out the basic composition. Then she adds paint, in various colors, tones, layers, and blends, building up the composition stroke by stroke. When she decides the image is complete, she stops […]

This may be controversial, but I will say it anyway: It is time to consider whether the world needs any more iterations of the famous, done-to-death, iconic, “big landscape” compositions. An online image search using keywords like “Mesa Arch,” “Yosemite Tunnel View,” or “Tetons barn” will yield vast numbers of cookie-cutter, cliché pictures. Though some […]

Down beneath the legs of my tripod, in the frigid, rushing flow of Bishop Creek’s middle fork, my bare feet were turning bright pink and trying to decide whether throbbing in pain or going numb was the lesser of two evils. I didn’t care much though, because I was living within an idyllic scene at […]