2010 Year in Review – Images by Art Wolfe

2010 started off with successful workshops in Southeast Asia.

I had special photo shoots for Epson and local Seattle television, as well as a pledge for Oregon Public Broadcasting.  I emceed a very profitable fundraising event for the Puget Soundkeepers Alliance, an organization that is working hard to keep the Puget Sound a viable and functioning ecosystem.

The International Conservation Photography Awards were kicked off with a special event at Seattle’s Benaroya Hall and then opened to great applause at the Burke Museum, which will host the event again in 2012.

I had gallery openings at the G2 in California and the Saxton Gallery in Ohio.  In my own gallery I opened the show “Unbridled”, featuring beautiful oversized prints of horses.

Throughout the year education continued to be a focus, with the Art of Composition tour and a four day workshop in the Grand Tetons. I taught a session at the Welt der Wunder Festival in Germany as well.

Wherever I went, I shot:  New York, California, at home in Washington State, including the Pride Parades in Seattle and Vancouver, BC.

Hinduism’s massive festival, the Kumbh Mela, was in Haridwar this year.  It was a crush of millions of people, it was oppressively hot, and infinitely fascinating and life-affirming.

In 2010 my public television show Travels to the Edge won five Telly Awards for excellence, and in October the Photographic Society of America honored me with the Progress Medal Award.  Outdoor Photographer magazine thrilled me by using my photo of the French Alps as the 25th anniversary cover.  Outdoor Photography magazine in the UK lauded me and 39 of the best nature photographers in the world for our conservation work.

I finished the year in Michoacan, Mexico, photographing the Day of the Dead festival for the first time and then headed off to Antarctica for the umpteenth time in December.

I wish everyone a healthy & prosperous 2011!

Spruce grouse, Denali National Park, Alaska, USA

And last week’s blackbear:

Weathered © Kah Kit Yoong

Kah Kit Yoong is a Melbourne-based travel and nature photographer. His background includes studies and qualifications in medicine and music. He was introduced to photography in 2005 while exploring the cobble stone streets of Italian towns. Later that year, he developed his skills while tramping the pristine wilderness of Tasmania. Kah Kit’s appreciation of the world’s wild places has inspired him to capture its landscapes. He has been widely published in numerous magazines, including National Geographic, Popular Photography and Nature’s Best. His work has been awarded both in his home country of Australia as well as in the UK and USA. This year he was a prize winner in the landscape category of the International Conservation Photography Awards, as well as receiving an honourable mention in the wildlife section. To view more of his photography visit his website www.magichourtravelscapes.com. News and more articles can be found on his new blog www.magichourunplugged.com.

Rhythm of the City © Kah Kit Yoong

Havana – a city of faded glories but still elegant in its decaying state. Nowhere is this more evident than the Prado, a marble-tiled, tree-lined avenue, surrounded by crumbling facades. It leads to another prominent feature of Havana, the Malecon, a roadway and seawall which stretches for 8 kilometres along the coast. In the afternoon, it will become a hub of activity for tourists and locals engaged in banter, people-watching, playing musical instruments or fishing. But this is dawn; the streets are almost empty save for the occasional vintage American car cruising past and the city is yet to rise from its slumber.

As I stroll down the Prado, I consider my options for my sunrise shoot. No doubt the Malecon at the end of the avenue would be an appealing subject. The rain clouds, responsible for the many puddles on the streets are starting to disperse and take on a pinkish hue. I am distracted by the brightness of some buildings at the end of a side street. The warm glow of sunrise is starting illuminate the taller buildings in the distance and my plans to proceed to the sea is abandoned in favour of exploring this part of the old city.

Kids at Condado © Kah Kit Yoong

Very soon, I come across a beautiful green 54 Chevy. The building behind is in a state of dilapidation, rough exposed bricks showing where a facade had been stripped off. I shoot a few frames of the car juxtaposed against the bricks but what I really want to do is incorporate some of that gorgeous light filtering through the city. When I turn the corner, an even more striking red Chevy awaits, shiny and glistening with droplets after the overnight rain. This time, the effect of the first direct rays of the sun can now be seen on the distant buildings. My tripod is soon set up and I carefully make a composition. Several locals have stopped to watch me and a man in a blue T-shirt across the street appears staring intently at me. I take a few exposures, with shortening shutter speeds to make sure he is frozen in the frame.

Musicians by the Malecon © Kah Kit Yoong

I had heard that Cuba is a country seemingly in a time-warp, decades behind the Western civilization. Recent reports indicated that this would soon change. Hence, the time seemed ripe for a visit and I spent 12 days traveling around the country in 2009. It was a departure from the nature-based photography that I’m more familiar with. I knew that it would present an opportunity to shoot a wide range of subjects, extending my comfort zone and skills as a travel photographer.

State of Decay © Kah Kit Yoong

One of the differences between a tourist and a travel photographer is the mindset in what they are trying to achieve with their images. The former usually takes photographs to preserve memories of the place as a way to document that they have been there. Their shots tell us the story about their trip. Travel photography, on the other hand, is about telling the story of the place. This may be from the photographer’s eyes but the best images feel as though we are seeing the place through those of a local. I don’t believe that you can truly capture the essence of a location in a single photo, but with a portfolio of images I think that is achievable. Certain images may go a long way in revealing the broad character of a place while others may only focus on very specific details. However seeing the images as a visual storyboard, the viewer should be able to get a good feel for the location, replacing the words of a description like the one above.

Dawn in Old Havana © Kah Kit Yoong

Since taking up photography, I have found that my senses are heightened when exploring a new city or country. I notice things on a grand scale as well as those small details that might have eluded me previously. There’s a process of deconstruction that I run through mentally : city, skyline, buildings, doorways and bricks. Or perhaps : traffic, car park, car, driver, bonnet, wheel, windows, etc. All of these may make suitable subjects in their own way. At the end of it all, by putting the images into a portfolio, the pieces are reconstructed to form a cohesive representation of the whole. I also find that photographing a wide cross-section of my subjects to be a useful and rewarding endeavour. As an example of this approach, when shooting portraits, I was sure to include both sexes in all the age groups : children, teenagers, adults and the elderly. The people of Cuba were very friendly and open to having their portraits taken so this became a major part of my portfolio.

Glory to God in the Highest © Kah Kit Yoong

Planning a shot list is an important part of putting together a visual storyboard. These may include specific subjects. My list for Cuba would have looked something like this : vintage cars, side streets, cobblestones, peeling facade, old men playing boardgames, doorways, rocking chairs, Malecon at sunset, musicians, instruments, hands, cigars, person smoking, factory worker, Coco taxi, farm animals, architecture, etc. Some of these are quite specific while other like cars are less so and benefit from a broader approach. I ended up with numerous Chevy images, including wide shots from numerous angles while other images focused on various components of the cars. For a different perspective, I took a few from a viewpoint behind the driver and experimented with panning moving vehicles as well as using slow shutter speeds while sitting in a Coco taxi to convey movement and speed. Other items on my shot list included concepts, ideas or feelings. Some examples : children having fun, rhythm, energy, the simple life, decay. Periodically, I made time to review all the photos that I have taken. I recall doing this the night before my last full day in Havana and realized that none of my images adequately conveyed ‘decay’. The afternoon, while exploring the old town, I pushed open the door to a set of apartments and found the exact scene I was looking for. It required some discipline not to photograph the brilliant sunset over the bay but from my image review the night before, I knew that I would have been going over old ground. It was with great satisfaction that I was able to shoot this last scene on a dilapidated staircase, knowing that it completed the story I wanted to tell about Cuba.

Guy Tal is a photographer, writer, and blogger based in Utah’s scenic canyon country. You can find more of his photography and essays on his web site guytal.com, or visit his gallery located in the town of Torrey, UT just outside Capitol Reef National Park. You may also follow him on Twitter at @guytalphoto.

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In Praise of the Intimate Landscape

By Guy Tal

Though I didn’t know it at the time, 1979 was to be a significant year in my growth as a photographic artist. More than that, it was a landmark year for all contemporary landscape photographers, and for the acceptance of color photography as a fine art. On that year, I celebrated my 10^th birthday against the backdrop of a historic Middle East peace treaty, the election of Margaret Thatcher, and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. Back then, I had no inkling of such concepts as exposure or composition, or even how to operate a camera. I lived in a world thousands of miles away from the places I will later come to call home, and was entirely unaware of their turbulent role in the American conservation movement. More pertinent to this article: on that same year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York held its first ever exhibition of color photography, celebrating the work of a quiet and passionate man in his late 70s with whom I later discovered I shared many similarities. The man was Eliot Porter, and the exhibit was titled: Intimate Landscapes.

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What was it about Porter’s color images that prompted an institution such as The Met to feature, for the first time ever, color photography among its vast collection of art, some as old as humanity itself? What made them so moving and powerful that, decades later, Porter’s work continues to inspire new generations of photographers? The answer lies in the title: intimacy. Much landscape photography sets out to document grand scenes and vast expanses, prominent land features, big skies, distant horizons, and dazzling displays of natural light at the borders of day and night. Such images draw their force from the sheer magnitude of the elements portrayed and the attention-commanding brilliance of magnificent color. Yet, such images also reduce the photographer and the viewer to passive bystanders – observers of the unfolding drama but not active participants. Intimacy, on the other hand, implies a degree of involvement, closeness, and familiarity that transcend anonymity. It implies a personal, emotional interpretation of the things being photographed and the unique qualities they possess which drew the photographer’s eye.

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Among the more cynical, a common quip is that “everything had been done before,” and that there’s little opportunity left for original work in nature photography. The notion of intimacy with the landscapes flies in the face of such statements. Certainly mountains, canyons, sand dunes, and beaches, have all been photographed many times before and, with the wide lens on, even the best of us would find it difficult to distinguish their work from any number of other renditions of these same subjects. Yet, go up in focal length, and begin exploring a subject deliberately, up close, in earnest, with no preconception, and you will find an endless array of graceful lines, patterns, subtle variations of color and tone, and any number of unique traits. Intimate landscapes thus readily lend themselves to original creative work, and to the much-desired development of the artist’s personal style. The success of an intimate landscape depends primarily on the subjective sensibilities of the artist, rather than an objective representation of a place.

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Many photographers are also under the mistaken assumption that “it’s all about the light,” or that great landscape images must be made within the narrow span of the “magic hours”. Not so. Light takes on many shades and colors, at every hour and on every scale. In the middle of the day, one can find a golden glow in the small crevices of a rock or among the petals of flowers. On overcast days, the land reflects in faint pastels. Even in near-darkness, long exposures can capture fleeting light for surreal effect. In the case of intimate landscape photography, it is the artist’s attention to detail that allows them to expand their repertoire and find nuggets of beauty in practically any situation, with almost any subject and any light.

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Lastly, going back to Eliot Porter’s legacy, one cannot ignore the subject of photography’s role in conservation and in raising awareness to unseen beauty. In particular, some of Porter’s most important images were made in Glen Canyon, remembered by some as the heart of the Colorado Plateau, prior to it being drowned under current-day Lake Powell. By the time Porter’s images of the place became known, it was too late to prevent the loss of what was a natural treasure on the magnitude of the Grand Canyon and other crown jewels of the American West. David Brower, legendary former director of the Sierra Club, later lamented its loss as the greatest one of his career. To date, the story of Glen Canyon galvanizes the American conservation movement as a loss that should not be repeated, and Porter’s images of what he later called “The Place No One Knew” are among the most powerful testaments to what’s at stake. They illustrate not a generic “pretty place” but rather moving portraits of a place that had a name and a character: rock patterns composed such that one can almost feel their grit under their fingertips, crystalline pools reflecting golden light with such clarity that you can almost feel their warmth on your face, and riparian vegetation vibrant and detailed that you can almost breathe its aromatic scent. Such is the power of intimate landscapes.

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