“Living Landscapes”

™Living Landscapes are the art of combining amazing landscapes with captures of the wildlife that spend their lives there.

This is accomplished through the use of composites. Masterfully matching “talent” and background characteristics to seamlessly integrate the two. All toward far more compelling and accurate re-creations of our actual experiences afield.

I’ve had to ask myself repeatedly over the years why close-ups of any insect, animal, bird, tree or flower, although crazy-cool and even glorious, leave me a bit empty unless surrounded by their native environments. The same with gorgeous, but empty landscapes.

The reasons seem to be two-fold;

For years the fledgling digital revolution simultaneously terrified and enchanted us with photographic possibilities. Early versions of Photoshop never seemed to match reality and whatever the latest fad, a sad few were sure to abuse the opportunity veiling even further its hidden potential. Thus we endured wacky colors, wackier transformations and, “photo-chopping.”  Arriving so close on the heels of the slide genre, where what-you-shot-is-what-you-got had reigned for so many years, the murky potentials of Photoshop composites and their adherents went dark for fear of poser-associations and group shamings. It was no one’s fault really, the engineers were making amazing progress. Digital was just a lot to wrangle and it took some years to polish that turd.

Secondly, no camera/lens combination exists that can capture in a single exposure, the wide field-of-view, true-to-life perspectives, the dynamic range, focal points and co-minglings of an impressive location and its indigent species involved in some natural behavior, all in a single exposure. I was a Navy diver and Recon Battalion Photographer and have been a compulsive shooter for over forty years since and have yet to pull off all of the above, simultaneously, in a single capture.

My social feeds are overflowing with amazing captures from all over the globe by many of the finest landscape photographers our world knows. Few include local wildlife. I have spent years training myself to change that. I specialized in butterflies and botanical photography. I grew larval food plant communities for endangered butterflies and amassed a personal collection of nearly two hundred different varieties of flowering trees from all over the world. I spent years as a native plant, watergarden and landscape designer and builder.

In developing Living Landscapes I’ve combined the skills and crafts of large scale, landscape captures, wildlife photography, advanced composites, and oddly enough, fashion photography and retouching, to craft and produce, “™Living Landscapes.”

Real Landscapes are Living Landscapes.

Please join us and get the wildlife and your art, the attention they deserve.