It’s kind of weird and kind of cool following a bus with your picture on it.

Forbes magazine is one of my oldest and best editorial clients. My first assignment for Forbes was 26 years ago (yep,I’m that old). This past fall, I photographed three assignments for them. Here’s a couple of them:

“Sean Campbell and Scott Swigart of Cascade Insights in Oregon City, Ore. conduct competitive intelligence searches in the technology sector. They often come across juicy info on employees’ LinkedIn pages: university students describing product features they worked on during summer internships (that haven’t yet been publicly disclosed); an AT&T sales representative’s boast that he worked with one of the company’s biggest Wi-Fi clients, volunteering that it was Nintendo’s $6 million account. Even senior executives slip up, as when Hewlett-Packard vice president of cloud services Scott McClellan outlined the details for HP’s planned cloud computing platform on his LinkedIn profile—while official reports were still extremely vague. Before he could delete the overshare, the news media picked up on it, and rivals Microsoft and Amazon got the lowdown.” source Forbes

Ken Westin, founder and CEO of Gadget Track from an editorial assignment for Forbes Magazine. Gadget Track software can help locate and recover lost and stolen mobile devices, digital cameras, laptops, iPhones, etc.. Photographed on the Broadway Bridge in Portland Oregon this past October.

More blatant self promotion, my new cover for Preservation. Image was licensed as stock photography from a previous editorial photo shoot for Via Magazine.

It’s always nice to shoot editorial travel photography assignments in your own neighborhood. Better yet when it involves food and drink. A fun travel assignment for Via Magazine. Thanks Maggie.

I’m very proud to present my contributions, the June and November pages from the Western Star Trucks 2012 Calendar. Produced with Creative Director Jeff Nichols, and Art Director Lawrence Wolf at CMD along with stylist extraordinaire Kymm Ernst.

A few weeks ago President Obama announced he would delay a final decision on the Keystone pipeline for one year. Now in a cynical political move Republicans are attempting to attach Keystone to the President’s jobs bill. This is a terrible plan and should be scrapped. Not only would the building of the pipeline itself cut a swath across six states, cross major rivers and threaten critical drinking and agricultural water sources, it says nothing of the oil it would transport.

Of course major oil companies and construction conglomerates such as Bechtel think it’s a great idea. It could certainly be argued that the enormous pipeline project would create jobs, but a deeper investigation would reveal the trade off would simply not be worth the ultimate price. Keystone would transport oil produced from Canada’s tar sands and while I’m certainly not opposed to some of the benefits of reducing our dependence on oil from the middle east, this is not the kind of oil we need to be producing.

I visited the Athabasca Valley region in Alberta, where the major tar sands production takes place, three years ago on an editorial assignment for Bloomberg Markets Magazine and what I witnessed shocked me. This is a near zero gain, environmentally devastating process. Let me explain.

The first step is the virgin boreal forest must be clearcut. The land is then strip mined for the sand which has oil embedded in it. Trucks transport the sand to processing facilites where the oil is extracted essentially by super heating with steam. It requires massive amounts of fresh water taken from the Athabasca River only a tiny fraction of which is clean enough to return. The toxic water left behind, some 90+% is then pumped into massive tailing ponds, some of the largest structures ever built by humans, currently covering 50 sq miles and easily visible from space. These massive toxic lakes of tailings are deadly to migratory waterfowl, killing thousands annually.

As if this weren’t enough the process produces three times the carbon emissions of normal oil extraction. The natural gas used to process tar sands in one day could heat 3 million homes. Considered too expensive previously oil produced from tar sand has only in recent years become feasible, due to high worldwide oil prices. I won’t venture what role our middle east wars have played in raising the price of oil but the connection seems obvious.

Coming from someone who drives a car, rides motorcycles and takes an occasional airplane, all this criticism might sound hypocritical. But building the Keystone pipeline will hand oil companies an incentive to expand production of this dirty oil, further increasing carbon emissions, keeping oil prices inflated and doing nothing to solve our dependence on oil. Our entire economy may be based on petroleum consumption but we’ve got to find a better way than this.

For more reading, John Lippert’s excellent story in Bloomberg can be found here: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=nw&pname=mm_0308_story1.html

National Geographic has another excellent story here: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/kunzig-text/1

A recent project completed for Tri-Met, working with Josh Berger (of Plazm fame), Doug Lowell, Sarah Cline and Camela Raymond at ID Branding. Still photographs are edited into short video clips accompanied by interviews with the various subjects. See the videos here:
http://whatmakesthisplacegreat.com/

A few recently published assignments,
Tad McGeer founded Aerovel which designs and builds unmanned aircraft out of a converted home near Bingen Washington, for Smithsonian. Link: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Drones-are-Ready-for-Takeoff.html

Portland timbers owner Merritt Paulson, for ESPN the Magazine:

Bandon Dunes Caddies, for Sports Illustrated:

I spent yesterday in Salem at the unveiling of the Oregon State Capitol Collection. My 1997 portrait of author Barry Lopez now hangs in a hallway on the Capitol’s second floor. It’s humbling to have my work included alongside so many art world luminaries and to know this portrait will live on for future generations in my adopted home state.

I love that show Storm Chasers, where they try to drive their heavily armored vehicles into tornadoes. As I child I was terrified of tornadoes but I now revel in the violence of powerful storms. Watching these guys drive right up next to the most powerful force in nature is mind blowing.

So it was a nice surprise when I recognized Marcus Guttierrez in a recent episode. Marcus is a film maker who specializes in capturing footage of natural disasters for IMAX productions. I met him and photographed him while on assignment for Fortune as he patiently waited on the flank of Mt. St. Helens in 2004 for a catastrophic eruption. He was excited about the the footage he would record if a massive explosion along the lines of the 1980 eruption occurred.

I pointed out that we were standing well within the blast zone of the 1980 event and that if it occurred, we’d be toast.