
Brian has been a naturalist and photographer since he was in grade school wandering around the local woodlots, marshes, and streams of midwestern farm country with a blue, plastic, hand-me-down Kodak Brownie Flash 20. Eventually graduating to 35mm SLRs, 4×5 press and field cameras, and for the last several years, full-frame digital cameras. When he was a child his family owned a couple of local weekly newspapers in eastern Illinois. His grandfather was the publisher/editor and his father was a reporter/photographer. His father was his first photography teacher and taught him about the technical side of film photography, including everything he knew about working in the darkroom, where he was a real master. Brian has been shooting Canon cameras since the mid-1980s when he decided to focus exclusively on nature, landscape, and wildlife photography.
Brian’s parents loved nature and passed that love down to him, and he, in turn, passed it on to his boys. Growing up in a rural Indiana farming community with woods, marshes, streams, ponds, and lakes to explore, all within an easy bike, ride Brian didn’t spend much of his free time indoors. The family would often spend weekends and school holidays at state parks or recreation areas where there were larger blocks of preserved nature, nature centers, and interpretive trails. Brian soaked it up like a big, thirsty sponge. Vacations were usually spent “up north” in Minnesota or Canada on a lake. Sometimes they would stay in a nice, cozy log cabin, and sometimes in a tiny fishing shack that was full of mosquitoes and had a family of skunks living under the floor. They were all fantastic adventures and left him wanting to visit real wilderness.
Brian’s first experience with landscape-scale wilderness was a trip to Yellowstone between his junior and senior years of high school for 2 weeks of backpacking through the northwest corner of the park. That trip dramatically changed his life and kindled a life-long passion for wild places that has drawn him back again and again to explore Yellowstone, GTNP, the surrounding national forests in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho (a region known as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem or GYE), and taken him from Mexico to Canada, Maine to California, and literally all over the Great Lakes. From the beginning, he took a camera along to help him learn more about nature by photographing the plants, animals, and natural features he encountered so he could refer to them later at home. At some point that morphed into a passion for photographing nature simply as an art form.
Over many years Brian has learned about photography from so many great and gracious photographers, and becoming a better photographer has definitely made him a better naturalist, gaining a very intimate understanding of plants, animals, and natural associations as a result of looking at thousands of them through the lens. It’s a synergy that he’ll never take for granted, and he is constantly learning about nature and photography.
Brian is a committed environmentalist, an outspoken advocate for wild things, and, through his photography, a witness for nature. He is appalled (as anyone with a conscience must be) by the global fragmentation, degradation, and outright destruction of precious natural systems by rampant human exploitation that he has seen in his short time on the Earth.
Brian lives in Montana at the north gate of Yellowstone National Park.