I was honored to be one of four "master" landscape photographers to discuss landscape photography in the 2009 Landscape issue of Outdoor Photographer Magazine.  My full comments were edited to a small article.   This document is the full text of what I said.  If you've seen the article there's a lot more here, if not this is the whole deal.

I strongly feel that modern day landscape photographers, especially the younger ones, know little and could care less about the tradition and history of our art form.  It's like young painters never having heard of Picasso.

1.   The three landscape photographers that were most influential to me are Eliot Porter, Philip Hyde, and David Muench.   I am purely a color photographer, and these three, with the addition of maybe Ray Atkeson and Josef Muench, really invented color landscape photography.  To me they are the creators of our art form. Also,  they all have a strong Southwestern bent to their work, which drew me in, and they were all large format masters which has been the mold for my career. Also, each one of them taught me a couple of important things.

From Eliot I got the idea that "intimate landscapes," not really closeups, but tighter compositions than the standard big scene, could be powerful statements for nature.   Also, his travels around the world inspired me to  drag a 4x5 camera all over the planet.

From Philip,  I learned to try to push the envelope with lighting.  He thought shooting just at sunrise and sunset was a cliche, and that trying to communicate the feeling of a 110 degree day in the desert had as much value as using magic hour light on his subjects.  Secondly, and probably most important of all, Philip images were always in service of environmental causes. I've really tried to emulate him in that regard.

David is a really imaginative and original photographer.  One of the things I took from him was the idea that bad weather was really the best time to shoot,  which is totally counterintuitive,  but absolutely the beginning of a whole new realm of spectacular landscape work. Second, David's work ethic is second to none.  Nobody,  with the exception of Art Wolfe,  who is in my age group,  has worked harder in the field than David--and it paid off for him.  His library is unmatched in size and coverage,  and most of images are magnificent.  I think only somebody like me, who has done the same kind of work could really appreciate how difficult his accomplishments have been.

I think these men have had a profound effect on the landscape photographers of the baby boom era.

Like many people, I started out imitating these styles, but after awhile I found my own path,  and I think people can recognize my work as a distinct progression from  the work of these great artists. Having said that, I see threads from all these seminal landscape photographers in everybody's work that has followed.

2.  Over the last 150 years I think landscape photographers, especially those working in color, have really learned to use light much better than those who worked in the art form before. Obviously,  capturing light that is changing very rapidly was just not possible with the early equipment.  This may be heresy, but there have been such great strides in the genre  since Ansel Adams, that his color work really doesn't appeal to me that much.  I think he would have a hard time getting one of his color images in the Sierra Club calendars. There has been a revolution in the time photographers will spend,  the mastery of color techniques,  and  the competitive nature of the business.   Although people like William Henry Jackson were important in the creation of national parks,  I think one major sea change with today's landscape photographers, including myself,  is their commitment to using their images in service of environmental causes: global warming, open space, depletion of natural resources,  wilderness and preservation of public and private lands, to name a few.  Aesthetically,  I do think Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter had a big impact on color landscape landscape photographers in freeing them up to work with classic art compositional techniques.  For me this means being able to shoot images without sky,  and using texture, pattern, rhythm, balance and other tricks to make compositions come alive.

Finally,  for me and my generation, and to a certain extent the generation before,  the transportation revolution of the late 20th century gave us the freedom to go practically anywhere. For Josef Muench, it meant he could visit Monument Valley something like 700 times.   For me, it meant I could now take my cameras down any wild river in the West, or to any national park or wilderness, and once I got there I had the clothing and equipment to live in the wilderness safely and  comfortably.    Also,  I could fly and drive to every great overlook and scenic vista in Ireland or Australia, and any country that had  good infrastructure became fair game for me and many of my colleagues.

3.  I did a book called Utah:Then and Now in which I rephotographed images from as far back as the 1860's as they appear today, so I really got to know the work of the early photographers of Utah.  It amazed me sometimes that these photographers were getting into some really difficult locales and doing some interesting and imaginative work. Some how,  they were also working with long lenses and really wide angle lenses, so the level of technology, from say,  1910 surprised me.  For most of my career, since I used a camera similar to theirs--a 4x5 view camera, I think I would have had quite a lot in common with the early photographers.  I probably had  a better light meter, and a better backpack, and better boots, and I had Fedex to get my film to the lab and back, but in many ways I am part of a long American tradition, which I'm  proud of.

4. For me,  I think one of the biggest revolutions in color photography, and it has carried over to digital,  is the advent of saturated film. I spent so many years with color film that was essentially almost black and white in its color renditions, or film that loved cyan above all other colors. Only the most exceptional, once a year lighting could make it look good.  When Velvia came along,  I felt like I had been set free. I think Eliot Porter,  who carried a large number of filters and produced some wonderfully saturated dye-transfer prints, would have loved it.

5.  I gave up the 4x5 camera about a year ago after a year of shooting both 4x5 and digital.  I think there will always be people that will love the 4x5 camera, but over thirty years of carrying  a 55 pound backpack finally caught up with me.  Obviously, I think most landscape photographers will be using digital equipment in the future. There are just too many advantages to the format and it is also a lot of fun. Once again I can use long telephotos and macro lenses and extreme wide angles.  Also, digital has opened up photography to a lot of people that might not have picked up a camera before, and a lot of them are shooting landscapes.  This has increased interest in the art form, and it's good for people like me, and it's good for the new people entering the scene.  Our local tv stations show a landscape photograph shot by an aspiring amateur every night during the weather portion of the show.  Some of the work is fantastic,  and it has elevated landscape photography in the public eye in Utah.  Also,  it is almost a given that people who start taking pictures of the beauty of nature will not want to see it destroyed.  We may be seeing with digital landscape photography a whole new grassroots group of people that want to preserve wilderness of national parks or open space because of their

hobby.

My equipment list through time.

1975   Fujica Rangefinder

1976 Olympus OM-1  Toyo Field Camera 135 mm Schneider lens   90mm Schneider lens

1978  All abvove plue 300mm Schneider

1980   Toyo Field Camera, all above plus 210mm Rodenstock lens

1984   All above plus 360-500 Tele Nikkor   75mm Rodenstock

1985    Using 4x5   and lenses only

1986    All above with 65mm  Schneider    400mm Kodak

1987    All above with 600mm Fujinon

1988  Add Linhof Master Technica, Pentax 6x7 with full complement of lenses

1989   All above with 180mm Rodenstock

1992   All above with Fuji 6x17 Panoramic

1994   All above with 58mm Schneider

2001   All above with 38mm Schneider and Sinar-F Monorail camera

2007   Fuji digital camera with Nikon lenses 80-200 zoom,  14mm, 80-400 zoom, 105 micro.  Plus 4x5 equipment.

2008   Retired all past cameras except Fuji 35mm and main  present system: Canon EOS-1 Mark III   Canon lenses 24-105 Zoom. 14mm,   100-400 Zoom,  16-40 zoom