My vision for my nature photography was set decades before I even owned a camera. And I got a camera years before I became a photographer.
The earliest seeds of the vision were planted on May 18, 1980. I was in kindergarten, growing up on a small farm in Puyallup, Washington, about an hour north of Mount St. Helens. I remember intently watching the surging ash column tower over the hillside as the volcano erupted on that Sunday morning.
As dramatic as that was, the regular trips my family made to Mount St. Helens after it stopped rumbling made an even bigger impression on me. Those visits gave me a benchmark to measure changes in nature, similar to the way that parents chart their children’s growth with pencil marks on the kitchen wall.
In our earliest trips, the view was completely gray — the land, the water, the air. Ash coated everything, reducing what had been a vibrant, pristine wilderness to a scene more resembling a black-and-white television show.
But just as the mountain’s perfect cone hadn’t been permanent, neither was the barren, monochrome post-eruption landscape. Over time, the ash was carried away by rain, melting snow and tourists. It took years, but the rivers once again flowed in color.
While the change has been dramatic at Mount St. Helens, all of nature is dynamic and change is everywhere. A meadow of wildflowers isn’t the same two summers in a row. A waterfall can produce blinding mist one month and be dry the next. The Grand Canyon is at least one grain deeper than it was when you began reading this essay.
Earth is as alive as we are — and my work is crafted to celebrate this Living Wilderness.