An incredibly destructive flood — the kind you might see once in 500 years — tore through Yellowstone National Park a few weeks ago, cutting off access to a wildlife hotspot popular with photographers. The park worked quickly to reopen other areas, but it’s not clear how long it will take to repair or replace roads that reach the Lamar Valley.
So what’s a wildlife photographer to do?
I like to use contrast in images. Often that contrast comes from light and dark. Other times it's from opposite colors.
In Puerto Rico, I had an opportunity to capture contrast in two butterflies — and the contrast was essentially the element of time.
As I was packing up my camera after photographing from the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, two men came up and asked if they could see what I was shooting. I said, "yes," and pressed the play button on my camera to display the last image I took that morning.
Without asking, one of the men rotated the jog dial on the back of my camera to see the other images I captured that morning. But he rotated it clockwise, and instead of seeing an earlier image, the camera displayed the first image on the memory card — one I took four days earlier.
"Wow!" he exclaimed. "Is that Niagara Falls?"
The Wilderness Act, which has preserved some of the most pristine areas of the United States, turns 50 next week. My absolute passion for nature photography has just turned 14.
The two are more related than they might seem.
My style of photography has always been to capture a "living wilderness." I believe the Earth is as alive as we are. And that means it is dynamic — always changing.
Because our lifespans are so short, it's hard to fathom a time when Mount Rainier wasn't there, when the Hawaiian islands were tiny buds on the bottom of the ocean, when the Grand Canyon was filled. But there are plenty of changes that we can witness.
