Winter Solstice 2024

December 22, 2024 in 2024

While I am not one to celebrate the holidays that come and go each year, I do like to acknowledge the profound seasonal shifts we experience. Today is the the Winter Solstice... the day in which the Northern Hemisphere experiences the least amount of daylight. From December 22nd and onwards, our days will get longer as the nights get shorter.

These atronomical oscillations are meaningful to me, as they are the things that truly impact the life on our planet. For me, this shortest of days is a time in which I reflect on the life I've lived, the people I've met, and those I have lost...

May you embrace the changing season and light...

It's Not About the Money!

July 31, 2023 in July 2023

This week’s blog is inspired by an online conversation I am having with another photographer. My colleague and friend has been taking photos of nature for nearly a decade, and inquired about increasing his sales and profile in the field. I’ve found that many of my fellow nature shooters believe that their photographs are a commodity that has value and can be monetized. While making an income in photography is a legitimate career, the capacity to generate a sustainable salary has become increasingly difficult. During this discussion with my friend and others on a photography forum, I shared the following thoughts…

About 25 years ago, I almost left my career in teaching to become a professional nature photographer. I had been teaching for about 5 years and barely made $28K/yr, while my modest photography stock portfolio was making about $5k/year. I did the bare minimum for self promotion and marketing, and relied on a stock agency to market and profit from our shared relationship. I was pushing about 300 new pictures to the agent annually, and this averaged to about one photo for every roll of film shot. Because I was relatively uninvolved with the business side of things, I reasoned that if I spent less time preparing biology lessons, grading student work, and working 9 hour days, I'd have more time for photography, more time to write, and more time to cultivate a thriving nature imaging business.

*Screech Owl Hiding in Plain Sight - TX*

25 years later, I'm glad that I decided to play it safe and stick with my career as a teacher, feeding my passion for nature photography through avocation rather than vocation. When I was contemplating a career move, digital photography was an idea, something relegated government work and lab experiments, it was not a viable medium for photographic artistic expression. Prior to 2002, digital cameras were slow, produced low resolution files, and frightfully expensive. Furthermore, the internet was in its infancy, and images were not as free and easy to access as they are today.

As has been discussed ad nauseam digital imagery and the expansion of the free World Wide Web killed the magazine and newspaper market, and thus destroyed many careers in photography. During the film era, Nature photography was a legitimate commodity because it required months to conceive an image and actually get a marketable shot. In the 1980’s I was doing research in the Pribilof Islands in Alaska, and was asked to document the landing of a thick-billed murre on its nest. I had access to a manual focus Nikon F2A and 500mm mirror lens to do the work. The set up took almost a day to conceive, and I needed to work from a blind to get the shot that I was seeking. Throughout the process, I shot multiple rolls of slide film, and most of the photos stunk for a wide variety of reasons. It is work and effort like this that made National Geographic Magazine a coveted keepsake, and their photographers treasures of the photo-journalistic world. In contrast to my efforts in the 80’s, I could fly to the Pribilof Islands today, and get the shot that took days in about 15 minutes (or less) with my current camera gear.

The photography we do used to be of great interest to magazine publishers, but with the easy access to exotic destinations (seems like everyone's gone to Svalbard these days), the better computer-based cameras, and less knowledge required to get a good picture, the images we make today are cheap and lack real monetary value. While the photos produced by nature photographers are better than ever, the pictures are essentially worthless. The real value in nature photography is in the experience of being there and enjoying the moment. The joy resides in making these images and recording a brief moment in time, while the experience is priceless. To put an exclamation mark on this thought, consider the following…

*Coyote and a Mutual Surprise - St. Croix River, WI*

I just lost my wife of 32 years to a neurodegenerative disease. She was 56 and I am 58. She enjoyed photography, nature travel, and wildlife as much as I do. We've been to Africa twice, Iceland twice, Costa Rica 10 times, throughout British Columbia and Alberta more times than I can remember. What sticks with me today is not the money I’ve made through publications, contests, or print sales; it is the memory of making the pictures with her, the solitude of these moments, and the feeling of being one with nature.

Get out their and experience the light… bruce

Somewhere between Djúpivogur and Egilsstaðir, Iceland
Nikon D810 + Nikon 16-35mm f/4VR

Happy New Year

January 01, 2017 in January 2017

Sunrise on the St. Croix, Minnesota
Nikon D500 + Nikon 200-500mm f/5.6G VR

Summer's End, 2016

September 05, 2016 in September 2016

Tomorrow is the first day with my latest crop of students. I began my teaching career twenty-four years ago and assumed it would be a short-term gig. I never experienced "the calling," an intrinsic desire to devote myself to serving children... to teach. Yet, here I sit with less than twenty-four hours to go, and I am excited to return to the classroom.

The Old Birch, Minnesota
Nikon D810 + Nikon 18-35mm f/3.5G

To those who ask, I claim to be a fortunate man. Married to the love of my life nearly three decades, I have been a researcher, traveler and photographer... all of which now fall under the category of avocation rather than career.

Ferns and Fog, Minnesota
Nikon D810 + Nikon 18-35mm f/3.5G

I didn't find teaching, it found me. Many years later, I now know that this thing I do is not "just a job." I have embraced the profession and the responsibility that accompanies the vocation. Undervalued by some and overvalued by others, I continue to search for ways to motivate and inspire.

Forest Fog, Minnesota
Nikon D810 + Nikon 18-35mm f/3.5G

So as I share this gallery of images made during my last week of "freedom," I both mourn and celebrate the passing of summer. The moniker of photographer/naturalist/traveler is laid to sleep for the winter and, with chalk in hand, I am ready to do that thing that I do best.

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