December Calendar Release – Kicking off a New Project

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I’m very excited to start a new mini-project celebrating unique landscapes and people’s connection to them.  I will create a file that includes a bit of a description of the place, a photo of the place (of course), and a monthly calendar!

Dec 2012 Calendar desktop Hamilton copy

The first one, December 2012, is a celebration of quiet and peaceful places among a matrix of urban areas.  The Mt. Hamilton Range, east of San Jose, is just that place.  A number of private landowners have helped preserve this dramatic landscape filled with true wild-ness, aka wilderness!

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Cara and Zach – Napa Style Done Right!

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engagement pic teasers-7139I was recommended to Cara and Zach through mutual friends and it’s been nothing but fun from day 1 at Ben and Nicks.  We shared a beverage and talked about the idea of a wedding, the role of photography and realized we would be a good match.  These two are enviros to the core and I can’t tell you how great it was to be a part of their big day.  They are both doing great things with their lives, spreading good will and advancing science.  Congrats to them on throwing an amazing celebration with some of the kindest, warmest people I’ve ever interacted with.

Here is a brief spin through their amazing day at the Robert Young Estate Winery in Healdsburg.  This venue was incredibly storybook-like with grapes, mountains and white picket fences.  The staff was wonderfully warm and I enjoyed my time there greatly!

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Humans Required Slideshow for the Bay Area Open Space Council

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I’m excited to be offering 13 slides from the Conservation:Humans Required project that I’ve been working on over the years.  This set of slides is particularly exciting to present to the Bay Area conservation professionals who will be attending a sold out seasonal gathering by the Bay Area Open Space Council at the David Brower Center in Berkeley.  The BAOSC is a fantastic organization that makes great things happen in the conservation world.  Thanks to Annie and Ryan for this opportunity.

These slides come from the heart as I want to inspire a new wave of conservation minded humans who see knowledge and commitment as an answer to habitat degradation.  Many of these photos depict places I am attached to as an ecologist, hiker, photographer, or just a philosopher.  All scenes are less than 150 miles from home.  All scenes feel like home…

Here’s a one slide of the show.  It should be fun and I hope to make some strong connections with new friends.

 

Conserving Natives – Both Plants and Knowledge

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I was recently approached by a naturopathic physician about art for her healing space.  I was immediately excited about the idea since she was also very interested in my ties to local botany and ecology.  A match made in heaven – healing, botany, conservation.  Yeah, sign me up!

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Two under Two Challenge

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It’s been a rough week.

Grandma got sick.  Really, really sick – like you don’t want me to tell.

Then Kaya,

then Mom.

And just as the light at the end of the tunnel was beaming into our weary eyes, Dad got hit.  We’ve had an intense medical ward energy looming over our days.  Chlorox, electrolye water, soiled rags.  When the rags ran out we soiled the towels, when the towels ran out – we just soiled whatever was left.

Medicine calls it Norovirus.  We called it a serious kick in the ass.

And in between the moments of little baby screams and there was a deafening silence.  The jackhammer in my head was so loud it was quiet.  Our minds drifted towards feeling healthy – sunny days on the beach and cool mountain breezes in enormous canyons.  Every pain, ache, scream, vomit became purely animal. Function over fashion devoid of intellectualism.  It was a priori life.  It was beautiful in a sick way. It is slowly returning us to understanding the power of our family unit, its resiliency and how we are blessed to have a team to create progress out of pain and love out of discomfort.

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Enter lil’ Cas

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We feel amazingly lucky and privileged to have a healthy newborn in our lives. Castilleja Riley was born on the day of the blue moon, August 31. She weighed 8 pounds and measured a smidge over 20 inches. The whole family is healthy and happy.

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Castilleja was named after the Indian paintbrush wildflower which blesses prairies, valleys, scrub and mountainsides. Indian paintbrush is a wonderful mid-summer perennial wildflower that celebrates beauty and versatility.
I’ll be back to blogging once we all settle in a bit.

Much love,
Lech.

Here comes #2

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We’re getting close and we’re so excited to see Kaya become the big sis.

Here’s to my beautiful wife and all she does carrying the weight. Literally.

This photo was created with a single off-camera light with a softbox.  (Oh yeah, and a pregnant lady too!) I love the creativity that emerges out of the constraints of a single light.

Only 3 more to go before we get the basketball team together 🙂

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The Walls of Glacier at 50mm

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Here’s a little snapshot I took of the eroding walls directly above Siyeh Creek in Glacier National Park.  I’ve bought into the “as seen by our human eyes” landscape shots more and more.  Don’t automatically put your wide-angle lens (24mm, 17mm) on in the great outdoors.  Take in what your eyes see at 50mm.  Yup – 50mm is about equal to the field of vision of a human eye.  That’s why many people just love the “feel” of a 50.  I personally love the way the Glacier wall is prominent, and huge, while it is accented with the coniferous trees below, and not a touch of sky above.  And yes, these are BIG walls, but they seem even bigger if they can’t fit into a camera frame! [click on image to enlarge any picture] Continue reading →

Interface: Transistion: Emergence: 初心

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I can’t wait to meet our newest bun in the oven.  My peace around this next stage is understanding where Kaya fits in – the big sister, the inspiration, the teacher.  Kaya, our only child, is hitting amazing notes of language development, taking kinesthetic leaps, and starting to interface with the world around her as a sentient-cognitive being.  It’s an unbelievable process witnessing her mind develop, transition and emerge.  The process has been brisk.  It is also warming; it has also presented up the Buddhist ideal of the “beginner’s mind”, or shoshin. This is shoshin: 初心 – as written (by computer) in Japanese.

There are lots of ideas, books, theorems that have been born in the womb of this quality. You can read your cerebellum blue about the idea.  You can meditate the idea into a form and quality you desire, but I believe that you will fall short until you engage in the empirical experience.  There is nothing greater than acting on what you believe.  The way to discover shoshin is to be a parent.

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Published in Bay Nature

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If there’s a magazine in the Bay Area that seems to sing to my skill set and interests, it is Bay Nature.  Bay Nature is an organic journey into all things natural that shape our landscapes and inspire the people who live in them.  Everything from redwoods, to tiny rare annual plants to mushrooms to the people who help conserve the resources live in this regional magazine.  Its the whole ecosystem, the anthropocene at its finest.  (I just learned to embrace this word at the 1st ever Society for Conservation Biology Congress in Oakland at which I spoke on some of my ecological work in the Oakland Hills and beyond)

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