Portrait of a Great Man

     I first photographed Cecil Andrus when he was governor for his third and fourth terms. He had already served two terms as governor, rising to power on a campaign of saving Idaho's White Cloud  Mountains from a massive open pit molybdenum mine. He had then gone on to serve as Secretary of the Interior in the Carter administration, overseeing the Alaska Lands Act and helping to protect more wilderness and wildlife refuges than anyone since.

    I remember thinking then that Idaho would be a very different place when he was out of office. And sure enough the ensuing years have brought increasingly strange and strident voices controlling public discourse and policy in my home state.

     The fact that a conservation-minded Democrat could be a popular four-time governor of one of the most conservative Republican states in the country spoke to his rare gifts and abilities. I most recently photographed the Governor for the Pew Charitable Trusts for its campaign in support of national monument protection for those same White Cloud Mountains that helped bring him to prominence.  We first talked about elk hunting -- he had taken a massive bull last year on the east side of the White Clouds. Then after I scouted and selected the location for his portrait, he helped carry my bag of light stands. Not many of my subjects have ever done that -- least of all octogenarians with a resume like his.  But in a way that small act spoke volumes about why he has become one of the great men of our times.

North Idaho

Most springs I don't go seeking rain, but this year is different, with so little precipitation in southern Idaho that much of the desert is already looking August brown. So I went north to the Lochsa River country, then up to Lake Coeur D'Alene. Green is good. Here are some still images I made in between shooting time lapse and video.

City of Rocks Workshop

It's a common adage that in the process of teaching, the teacher learns as much as his or her students. Having just finished a photography workshop at City of Rocks National Reserve and Castle Rocks State Park I'd have to agree. First you have to articulate what it is you know or think you know.  Instead of just doing photography there's a deconstruction of  what that "doing photography" is all about exactly.  And then you have to communicate that information in a way that makes sense and is, hopefully, somewhat entertaining. Thanks to the workshop students for being part of my education and to parks superintendent Wallace Keck, a fine photographer in his own right, for putting it all together.

That icon of photography, Ansel Adams, came up in discussions about purity in photography and Photoshop manipulation. As someone who started photography learning Adam's Zone System, which involves compressing or expanding the tonal range of an image, I understand that Adam's created  his images as opposed to just recording what was there. And we do so today, often using Photoshop, although rarely as artistically as Mr. Adams.

I decided to work a few images up as B&Ws in a tip of the hat to Ansel, a teacher for us all.

Craters of the Moon

Craters of the Moon National Monument was one of the first places I visited when I moved to Idaho more than three decades ago, and it's a place to which I often return. A landscape of lava flows and craters, limber pine and rabbit brush, its mood changes dramatically with the weather. Yesterday morning we awoke to golden light streaming across the lava, backed by darkening clouds which turned to swift-moving snow squalls.

The Outdoor Studio Office

Compost Compositions

For years I've walked to the back of our yard to dump compost into the bins we've built next to our garden, often admiring the compositions created by the garden and table scraps. So in the fall I began periodically photographing them, chronicling the changing of the seasons as reflected by the waste we produce. I'm continuing to shoot these compost compositions, but here is a sampling so far: