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:

The autumn color is stunning this year in Idaho, and after two-plus months of looking at the landscape through a shroud of forest fire smoke, it is especially welcome. These are from a recent shoot in the Sun Valley area.

Weiser Fiddle Festival

The Weiser Fiddle Festival officially begins the third week of June, but for a lot of musicians the festivities begin a week earlier in an adjacent plot of dry, scrubby land known as Stickerville. It is here where musicians return each year to set up camp beneath the thorny black locust trees and play music until the wee hours of the morning. By the time the official festival reaches its peak, Stickerville is largely empty, and will remain so until next year.

Muzzie Braun, Where Music Lives

For the past 36 years Muzzie Braun has lived along Slate Creek in the White Cloud Mountains of central  Idaho, where  wolves, mountain lions and bears outnumber people by a wide margin. Despite – or perhaps because of – its extreme isolation,  Braun has created a  musical life that extends far beyond his mountain home. He tried his hand at Nashville, but says, “either I didn’t get them or they didn’t get me.” But his father was a musician, “so I knew it could be done.” In the 70s and 80s he performed with his brothers Gary and Billy as the Braun Brothers. He created  a band with his four sons, Muzzie and the Boys, which played  on the Late Show with Johnny Carson and Jay Leno.  And he has recorded a dozen albums. Muzzie organizes and plays the annual Braun Brothers Reunion, a 3-day music festival in Challis, Idaho, which headlines national recording artists, including Reckless Kelly, fronted by two of his sons. “We were lucky enough to find a special place where we could raise our family, I could write my music and conduct business from the comfort of our home.”

More images from the series "Where Music Lives" can be viewed at my website under Projects.