Portfolio Update
I have finally gotten around to updating the recent work folder on my website. Check it out if you have a minute and feel free to comment below. The images include pictures from a short trip to Ireland in August this year, as well as images from two years ago. The images are from both the Republic and Northern Ireland.
I plan to also order and update my other folders in the next few weeks, going through the current selection, adding a few new images, and adding water marks with my logo to all images now that I have an automated script and droplet for that in Photoshop (yay me!). Below are four images from Ireland that didn’t make it onto the website, I still like them though. As with all the pictures I share, these are for sale as fine art prints (and stock photos). Chair in a fence for your living room, anybody?
New Postcards, new exhibit and new Print Prices
As of early June (hopefully June 10 or so) I will be exhibiting a few of my prints at Freundsaft. The show will be a mix of regular prints and prints on canvas (a first). I will also have some postcards printed – another first – which when they are finished will be available at Freundsaft and Buchhandlung Schwarz. I will also sell them through my website in packets of 10 in a little bit.
Looking at how much this exhibit cost, and since I have not raised the prices for my fine art prints (limited and numbered, available by emailing me) since 2008, I will also slightly raise my prices as of June 15, since costs of production have increased over the last few years. If you have been toying with the idea of purchasing a print of one of my images for a while, now would be a good time. Send me an email and I will have the image made and sent to you asap.
As a teaser, here are previews of the postcards I will have made (click on the images for larger size):
New Year, new computer, new (years) resolution
Dear readers (wordpress tells me there were still some of you left in 2013),
first of all I wish you all an exciting, insightful, enjoyable 2014!
2013 has been a busy year, and photography, alas, was not my highest priority for most of the year. On top of my preoccupation with other things, I have had neither what could be called a functioning computer nor an internet connection at home. This has forced me to put off sorting, editing, and sharing my photos (I did still take a few … thousand … which I am eager to go through). As I write this entry, however, my new Acer V5 netbook sits before me on the table and is only waiting for an SSD drive to arrive at my house in the next few days so that I can finally get started installing an OS, Lightroom, Photoshop and all the good stuff to dig into all those photos from Alaska, Marocco, Mallorca, Romania, Ireland, Germany, California, still sitting unprocessed, and sometimes never seen even by me, on various harddrives.
Which brings me to point three of my post, the resolution. One of my new years resolutions is to be less negligent of my blog and my photos this year. There are literally thousands, probably tens of thousands of pictures waiting for me to go through and actually do something with: post them here, on my website (where, let me remind you, you can aquire large format, limited, numbered and signed prints at a more than reasonable price), as well as offer them to more magazines, stock agencies, and galleries.
So now it’s out; and, tellingly, I only have a photo on my stick to seal the deal that’s, uhm, pretty old … but at least it’s a moose cow looking optimistically into the new year.
Moose Cow “sealing the deal.”
Talk on the Canadian Forest this Sunday
I will give a talk on the Canadian forest and its inhabitants (humans and animals) this Sunday (July 8) at 2 p.m. It is part of a whole day focusing on the Canadian forest in the Waldhaus Freiburg (Wonnhalde 6, 79100 Freiburg).
Although I am not exactly sure what I will talk about yet, I am certain that I will show lots of beautiful images of the landscape and the animals living in it. The talk itself will most likely be a very non-academic reminiscing about my travels in the Canadian West with some observations about the behavior of bears, moose etc. thrown in, and it will be in German.
You can download a pdf with the program for the day here. Hope to see some of you there.
Bald Eagle in Morning Fog, Great Bear Rainforest, Canada
Alaska exhibition in Stuttgart opens tomorrow
Just a quick last minute reminder that my exhibition “Alaska – The Last Frontier” in the James-F.-Byrne-Institut, Charlottenplatz 17 in Stuttgart will open tomorrow at 7 p.m. I am quite excited to see my images as large format prints and nicely framed on display again – the cellar’s just not a good place for them. I am also surprised to see that most of my top picks of 2009 are still among my favorites, although so far I took out three of my old images and will probably take out two more that I’m not quite happy with anymore. I will also add five new images. You can preview these below.
The decision about which ones to add was a tough one once again, I could easily have added another twenty – for one there are no porcupines among the images I have on display. As a small consolation to myself and maybe some of you, I will show most of the close contestants in the slide show for my opening talk tomorrow evening. I hope to see some of you in Stuttgart, but even if you miss the vernissage tomorrow, the images will be on display until September 21. This means that at least the Germans should have a chance to look at them.
PS: Looking through my images and additions again I have to say, I do love my bears.
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- Bears Fishing in the McNeil River. I like the combination of the sharp bears and the blurred water.
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- Footprint of a Coastal Brown Bear in Katmai National Park
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- A muskox bull on the North Slope along the Dalton Highway, Alaska.
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- American red squirrel, Kenai Peninsula, Alaska.
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- A Brown Bear Sow with three cubs wanders over the mud flats of the McNeil inlet after sunset.
Strange Days & Upcoming Exhibition
Dear readers,
please excuse the long silence. My life has recently been full of work and taken a few unexpected turns, which have kept my priorities focused on other things than updating my blog. Among other developments I now once again live in my native town of Freiburg, Germany, something I would not have considered possible as recently as three months ago. The city and its inhabitants have treated me very nicely so far, however, so I expect to stick around for a while and explore Europe some more. There are also a few things worth mentioning regarding my photography:
To begin with there are some excellent news: I was contacted by the German-American center in Stuttgart last week. They want to exhibit my Alaska images. The exhibit will open June 14 2012 and I will give a talk on my travels through Alaska on opening night, and show some slides. I also plan to switch a few of the images exhibitied three years ago in Freiburg, take out one or two I don’t like anymore and add one or two new ones from a short trip through Alaska’s panhandle last year and possibly include a few from my 2008 trip I overlooked last time.
In other news: I booked a last minute (!) trip to Turkey, something I have never done before (but figured I should do once in my life as a self experiment), and will fly there tomorrow morning. I expect German tourists and sociological oddities. Fortunately I also booked a car, so I can escape from the holiday ghetto I am spending my nights in. I will post images if I get anything worth sharing with the world. I am excited since I have never been to Turkey before, but a bit worried about my vegan food options.
The Great Bear Rainforest
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to visit the Great Bear Rainforest. The GBR, originally known as one of the most special places in British Columbia and home to the illusive spirit bear, one of the major photographic goals of my trip, sadly has recently become a place which has received less positive media exposure as the object of desire of Alberta’s Enbridge company which is planning to end its Northern Gateway oil pipeline in Kitimat, just outside the Great Bear Rainforest. As if this was not bad news enough in itself, considering Enbridge’s record of leaky pipelines and a general tendency towards hubris in our species, Enbridge furthermore plans to send super tankers down the coast, a body of water which has a reputation of being exposed to really severe weather conditions and is difficult enough to maneuver even in favorable conditions. The idea behind all this is to open the Asian markets for Canada’s tar sands, which in themselves are another major environmental concern. Staying with the topic of having around 225 oil tankers a year cruise up and down a rough body of water along a pristine ecosystem, however, I do not believe that it takes a genius to figure out that this is calling for trouble (besides continuing the great Canadian tradition of trampling Native land claims under foot) – trouble that could easily reach the proportions of the Exxon Valdez catastrophe in the late 1980s when one of the ships runs on ground as it is bound to sooner or later. If you are as concerned about this as I am, Pacific Wild’s website might be a good place to start, but there are literally dozens of other groups opposing this madness, offering petitions to sign etc.
Now to my trip, though. It would be an understatement to say that the trip exceeded my expectations. Among the highlights were the chance to see and photograph spirit bears (initially a somewhat hyperreal experience considering how much I had read and image-searched earlier, but eventually a very special moment), see four humpbacks breaching almost in perfect synchronicity literally 30 or 40 meters from our boat, photographing coastal wolves (though from afar), seeing and photographing my first pine marten, and finally witnessing one of the most obscenely gorgeous photographic scenes I had ever seen: grizzlies in front of a rain forest scene with the early morning sun burning away the fog; a scene so perfect one could not have improved it with a brush and canvas – oh, and did I mention the two eagles sitting in the tree to the left?
Anyway, I will be silent so you can have a look at my images. There are more images from the trip on my website.
A bald eagle taking off.
Curious pine marten.
Black Bear on Gribbell Island.
My first spirit bear. Spirit (or Kermode) bears are black bears who carry a recessive allele that gives some of them white fur. There are only a couple white hundred individuals, most of them around Princess Royal Island.
Breaching Humpback Whale.
Grizzly Bear in the Great Bear Rainforest.
The first (and possibly last) arboreal seal I have ever seen.
Coastal Wolf in Rescue Bay. These wolves fish for salmon along the creeks and are pretty damn elusive. This image was taken with my 500 mm lens, but nevertheless turned out to be more of an animal scape.
The Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals / A chance to use my photos for animals
Kessi and I went to a meeting of The Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals last Saturday and were impressed enough with their work and professionalism to join the Association on the spot, and to sign up to volunteer at one of their info tables, at the EPIC tomorrow, in fact.
Furthermore folks at the Association are in desperate need of a wildlife photographer (well, I might be exaggerating a bit), and seem really interested in using some of my images (which I will be donating) for their newsletters, campaigns to ban trapping for fur, the trapping of so called “nuisance animals” like beavers and coyotes and so on. I might also get a chance to sell some prints at their info tables, in which case I would of course donate some of the profits.
What is even more exciting, is that it looks as if I will be joining the Fur-Bearer Defender staff on their visit to a shelter for orphaned and hurt North American animals in early June, Critter Care in Langley. The shelter is not usually open to the public and this sounds like a great chance to get images of some rare and / or small animals I might not easily get to photograph in an ethical setup, i.e. not a zoo or one of those despicable game farms that some so called wildlife photographers chose to support.
I hope I will manage to take some good photos, from what I have seen of Critter Care so far the shelters were not exactly set up with photography in mind. I will keep you posted once I get results.
So as not to upload another post without images here are a few images of fur-bearing animals and some background on how they are affected by trapping and hunting, the list is of course much longer and I won’t even go into the issue of fur farms, not today anyhow:
Beaver, Alaska
Communities like to trap and kill beavers as they see them as “nuisance animals,” at least when the little guys have the temerity of establishing their home base next to people’s houses. While it is true that beavers occasionally cause flooding, they are extremely predictable in their habits and there are a number of cheap, non-lethal alternatives such as pond levelers and Beaver Deceivers (I just love the name) to ensure that people and beavers can happily coexist.
Furthermore scientists are beginning to understand that beavers have a positive impact on the environment, e.g. by re-naturalizing rivers and thus providing salmon habitat.
Coyote, Alberta
Don’t ask me why but coyotes, too, have a really bad rep throughout North America. Maybe it has to do with the fact that most people can’t tell coyotes and wolves apart, and that wolves have been leading actors in way too many scary stories. Considering the love most folks have for dogs their neglect or hate for wolves and coyotes strikes me as extremely irrational, especially when one sees how closely wolves, coyotes and dogs are related.
Anyway, communities and other undereducated members of the public like to trap, shoot, maim and kill coyotes for various reasons. On top of that the RCMP has apparently recently added coyote fur trim to some of their winter jackets in addition to the muskrat fur they use for their caps. Great job, Constable Fraser and company!
Remember those silly black hats the guards outside Buckingham Palace wear? Unbelievably they are still made out of Canadian black bear fur, one bear per hat. Talk about unnecessary cruelty …
Having spent quite a bit of time with these magnificent animals in the wild this is one point that particularly riles me. It is just as bad as those pathetic cowardly $#%& who want to reaffirm their manhood by shooting defenseless bears (did someone say Sarah Palin) – which of course is also still legal in BC…
Off to Costa Rica
I had hoped to have time to do another blog post before this one, but, as they say, time flies and there were so many things to be taken care of that it’s already early February and we’re off to Costa Rica for three weeks. In fact we fly this Saturday in the a.m.. Since I have never been to Costa Rica or anywhere else in Middle America for that matter I am not only excited, but also rather short on images to use in this post. Also we changed our ISP so that we currently have no internet at home, which does not help either, – so please bear with me and excuse the language only form of this entry.
Anyway, we will be staying in places that have internet for the most part while in Costa Rica, so I plan to do one or two updates from there which will probably be rather heavy on images. For now stay tuned and wish me a good flight ;)!
New blog up!
Welcome to my new blog and a happy 2011!
In the future I will regularly post updates and new photos on this blog as they become available. I will also inform you of relevant changes on my website. If you subscribe to this blog you will be informed of any new posts and images as they go online. I hope you follow and enjoy this blog.
Below, as a starting image for both 2011 and my new blog, is an image taken of the frozen Maligne Lake in Jasper National Park in February 2010. Please remember that all my images published here or on my website are also available as prints ;o).
Winter on Maligne Lake, Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada
Fehrle Photography Blog 