About

Conservation Photography in Minnesota

I photograph in Minnesota, mostly wildlife and the water it depends on. Somewhere along the way I came around to the view that a picture of a place is worth very little if the place is not there in ten years. That is the argument this whole site is making. Beauty worth seeing, beauty worth saving, and the second half is the part that costs something.

Conservation photography is less a genre than a method, and the method is going back. One good frame of an animal mostly proves you got lucky. Returning to the same water across eight years, in high water and low and in the winters nobody wants to stand around in, produces something a person can actually learn from. That is why there are three projects on this site instead of thirty.

The wood ducks are the clearest case. The bird had nearly vanished a century ago, and it came back because of a hunting ban and then because of a few thousand plywood nest boxes put up by people with no guarantee any of it would work. The refuge those birds use exists for the same unglamorous reason, which is that enough people decided a stretch of the Minnesota River was worth keeping. None of it was inevitable. The photographs are the easy part.

The waterfall work runs on the same principle. I have photographed Caron Falls since 2016. The unnamed falls around Duluth are exactly what the name suggests, creeks nobody bothered to put on a sign, which makes them simple to overlook and simpler to lose.

Every photograph here is one I made myself, on location. None of them are generated. A good share were shot on manual lenses built before autofocus existed, which slows everything down, and slowing down is largely the point.

I am a photographer in Minnesota. To contact me call 952-300-7711. All calls or emails offering me website or IT sales are subject to a 199$ fee for taking the call or reading the mail, per call or email. Again, if you are calling this number to offer me website SEO services or for me to purchase anything, it is a $199 fee to talk to you.