I usually have a few ongoing personal writing and photography projects that give me the chance to explore subjects that I find interesting and believe are important. Here’s what I currently have in the works:
Cougar Catchers
Mountain lion with ear tags in a ponderosa pine, Umatilla National Forest, Oregon.
Over a three-year period, I documented wildlife researchers studying mountain lions in Oregon’s Blue Mountains, capturing the cats to fit with GPS tracking collars, finding and examining the remains of their kills, looking for scats for DNA analysis and sneaking into den sites to check on kittens. In addition to the photographs and interview material I produced on this project, I am continuing to research cougars and photograph them with remote cameras. My long-term goal is to assemble a historical, scientific and cultural portrait of this unique, large native cat of the Americas and its place and future in today’s world for a potential future book or other media project.
Burnscape
Over the past two decades, large areas of the central Oregon Cascade Mountains, where I live, have burned in wildfires caused by a number of factors including a warming climate. I have been photographing this region, which, in a very short period of time has been transformed from a largely unbroken coniferous forest into an ecological mosaic ranging from healthy, green trees to stark, burned landscapes. Still in its early stages, I hope to move this project, in both images and words, towards examining how climate change is impacting the Pacific Northwest’s mountain ranges.
Skeleton forest, Lake George Burn - 2006, Deschutes National Forest, Oregon
Cascade Camera Project
Black bear photographed with a camera trap, Metolius River basin, Oregon.
Since 2011, I have been photographing wildlife in the Metolius River basin of the Cascade Mountains with camera traps to document the presence of different species that would otherwise be difficult to find and approach without affecting their behavior. Supplemented with traditional wildlife photography techniques, I want to eventually use this project to show the diversity of wildlife that lives on the east slope of the Cascade Mountains, promote protecting their habitat and advocate for restoring species that are either now rare or have been extirpated.