For more than a half century, I have been exploring the photographic potential of my home region in the Pacific Northwest. I have traveled with my cameras as well throughout the western United States and also to Australia, Canada, Mexico, Peru, and India. Decades ago, I stopped counting how many exposures I’d made (millions, I’d guess). Two decades ago, I began to concentrate my photographic efforts on Oregon’s relatively unphotographed northeast corner.

As a young boy, I decided that wild landscapes are really appealing, that rural landscapes are somewhat less appealing, and that urban landscapes are not appealing at all. For many years, I thought hiking and climbing was what I wanted to do in wild landscapes, and I went on expeditions to some of the wild and remote mountain ranges of the world. But by my early thirties, it had occurred to me that what I really wanted to do with wild landscapes was to take pictures of them. It seemed more fun and certainly less dangerous to express my enthusiasm that way. Judging by how many climbers have transitioned to photography, this was not an original thought on my part.

Me in 1964, future uncertain.

Photo by Bob Peirce.

Climbing in the Andes, 1964.

Photographing wild landscapes also showed promise as a means of making a living. Over the years, my images have sold to a wide range of regional and national publications, including books by National Geographic and Time-Life, magazines like Popular Photography and Outdoor Photographer, and calendars by Audubon and the Sierra Club. My fine art prints have been sold by numerous galleries and have regularly won awards at art shows. I have accepted photographic assignments from publishers, ad agencies, governmental agencies, and conservation organizations such as Western Rivers Conservancy and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

I began with a 35mm film camera in the 1960s, graduated to a 4x5 view camera in the 1970s, and grudgingly abandoned film for digital in 2008. After toiling in a chemical darkroom for decades, I now create Ultrachrome prints in my digital darkroom with a wide format printer. Sadly, although digital photography is easier and produces “better” results, film photography was more fun. Yes, the older some people get, the better the past looks to them. Maybe it’s not objectively true that film is more fun, but that’s how I remember it.

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