October/November 2016 Archives - Outdoor Writers Association of America

Letter to the Editor

OWAA Developer — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 19:44:51 +0000

MISSING PRINT DIRECTORY
I am disappointed that OWAA has chosen to not print a directory since the 2014-15 version.
I have been an OWAA member since 1985 and have attended eighteen annual conferences, including this year’s.
My well worn OWAA directory has always been on my desk with other references. I considered the directory a big benefit paid for by my dues and one which I mark up and use on a regular basis.
It is on line, but I live and work in rural Vermont and do not have the luxury of high speed internet.
Perhaps another reason I want a hard copy is that I am old. I read three newspapers a day in the print version which I can hold in my hands while I seldom read other newspapers online. I want a directory I can thumb through, not click through.
— Gary W. Moore, Bradford, Vermont
OWAA responds …
Dear Gary,
As a professional organization we occasionally have to make decisions that will inevitably disappoint a few of our members. The decision to no longer print a directory is one of those decisions. Here is some of the thinking behind why we moved this valuable member benefit online.
The purpose of the directory is twofold. The first, and more important, purpose is to provide members with the current contact information of their fellow members. OWAA routinely adds new members (70 as of this writing) who often join after the directory has gone to print. Depending on when they join and the print cycle we are in, it could be more than a year before their information was available in a printed directory. With the online directory we are able to update it twice a month, and members can change their information at any time. As a professional journalism trade association having accurate and up-to-date information is essential and the printed directory could be out-of-date by the time it reached members’ mailboxes.
The second purpose of the directory is to provide members with important organizational information such as current bylaws, leadership, award winners and committee assignments. We want members and supporters to have the most current information readily available. Here again the limitations of a printed directory come into play. Our leadership changes during our annual conference and our conference dates are different every year so synching publication of a directory to try and keep it current was often difficult to achieve. The printed directory was often incomplete and inaccurate because of the print deadlines.
The online directory is not only up-to-date, it’s also portable. You can check it wherever you travel. As a reminder the link is https://owaa.org/directory.
The costs of production of the directory in time, resources and money were significant and when the end result was a product that was not accurate or current, the change to the online form was the sensible course of action.
We are constantly looking at better ways to improve our services to the members whether it is Outdoors Unlimited, our annual conference or the directory.
At headquarters, we enjoy and appreciate hearing feedback from our members and the opportunity to share our thinking. We encourage you all to keep in touch.
— Tom Sadler, OWAA Executive Director
Feedback guidelines
Members are encouraged to write about issues and topics. The executive director and editor will decide whether opinions are appropriate for debate or if the comments promote a personal cause; if the “cause” is unrelated to OWAA’s mission and potentially damaging to the membership, the letter might not be printed. Word limit: 400. Longer letters will be returned for revision. Letters are not edited for grammar, spelling or style. Send letters to editor@owaa.org.

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In memoriam: Spencer Turner Dec. 10, 1939 — Aug. 26, 2016

OWAA Developer — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 17:56:51 +0000

Longtime OWAA member Spencer Turner of Columbia, Missouri, died of pancreatic cancer Aug. 26. He was 76.
Turner joined OWAA in 1983. He served on its board of directors and won the Outstanding Board Member Award in 1995. He became president of OWAA in 2005 and received the Ham Brown Award in 2014.
Turner attended OWAA’s annual conference July 16-18, in Billings, Montana, this summer. His friend and fellow OWAA member Jim Low said attending this conference was important to Turner. It gave him a chance to say goodbye to friends and afterward he went fishing and caught his last trout.
To learn more about Turner, his career with the Missouri Department of Conservation and his dedication to OWAA, read the profile Low wrote about his friend and colleague for Outdoors Unlimited at https://owaa.org/owaa-legends/spencer-e-turner-iron-man-in-chest-waders/. You can also read a tribute to Turner written by Joel Vance at https://owaa.org/blog/2016/09/guest-post-joel-vance-spence-turner/.

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Welcome to OWAA

OWAA Developer — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 17:44:40 +0000

Kim Dinan is a freelance writer and blogger. Her work has appeared in Northwest Travel Magazine, OnTrak Magazine and Parks and Recreation Magazine, among others. In 2014, Dinan and her husband were hired by Backpacker Magazine’s Get Out More Tour and hiked and camped their way around the U.S. while delivering presentations about the outdoors along the way. Her blog was named one of the best outdoor blogs by USA Today, and Sourcebooks will publish her forthcoming travel and adventure memoir, “The Yellow Envelope,” in April 2017. A general outdoors junkie, she has been lucky enough to hike and backpack all over the world. You can find her online at www.so-many-places.com.
Debbie Hanson is a freelance writer based in Fort Myers, Florida. Her work, which focuses on freshwater and saltwater fishing, has been featured in publications such as Florida Game & Fish magazine, USA Today Hunt & Fish, BoatUS Magazine and Times of the Islands Magazine. You can read her weekly angling-related blog posts at TakeMeFishing.org and visit her personal blog at Shefishes2.com. She graduated magna cum laude from Western Illinois University in English and journalism. Connect with Hanson on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/debbiehanson or via Twitter @shefishes2.
Ryan Hughes is a lifelong hunter, fly-angler and surfer from Santa Rosa, California. He is 21 years old and a senior at the University of Nevada, Reno, studying journalism. His passion for outdoor writing was sparked at the beginning of his freshman year of college, while working on his associate’s degree in social and behavioral science at Santa Rosa Junior College. He began writing stories of his hunting adventures and sending them to friends and family. Meanwhile he spent his days off surfing and hunting with a bow, rifle, or spear-gun. After transferring to Nevada, Hughes decided to pursue his passion for writing by studying journalism and has landed various writing jobs like working for liveoutdoors.com and freelance writing for several publications. Recently he had the opportunity to write as an intern with theinertia.com, in Boise, Idaho.
Jim Mosher is a retired natural resource and wildlife ecologist. He grew up in and around New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Following graduate school, he spent considerable time in the Intermountain West and on Alaska’s North Slope. He taught in the University of Maryland’s wildlife management program before managing nonprofit conservation organizations. He served as the Isaak Walton League of America’s conservation director and as executive director and board member of the North American Grouse Partnership and the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay. He served a two-year appointment as deputy assistant secretary for the Department of Interior’s Fish, Wildlife & Parks Division. Mosher is an upland bird hunter and an avid sailor. He has cruised coastal waters from New York to Key West. His writing and photographs have appeared in Outdoor America magazine, Grouse Partnership News, Spinsheet and the Bay Journal. He maintains a personal blog at www.chesapeaketidings.com.
Charlotte Orr is a graduate student at San Jose State University, where she studies journalism and mass communications. Her specialty and passion is working on environmental campaigns. Orr spent about five years working for Tuleyome, a northern California conservation organization. There she managed media and communications for the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument campaign, which was successfully designated by President Obama in 2015. This year, Orr spent her summer interning at The Wilderness Society in Seattle, where she provided communications support for several campaigns and conservation efforts in the Pacific Northwest. She is hoping to complete her master’s degree in December 2016.
John Pickles is a wildlife, nature and travel photographer. He has photographed in the U.S., Canada and Mexico and made extended trips to China, India and Iceland. He won first grand prize and best of contest awards in the Valley Land Fund and Coastal Bend wildlife photo contests in Texas. Pickles leads photo tours to Alaska, Iceland, Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park and guides photographers on south Texas ranches. He is active in the New Orleans area in photography-related organizations, is a certified Louisiana Master Naturalist and conducts photography classes. His publishing credits include Nature’s Best Photography magazine, Ranger Rick, My Big Back Yard, Trailer Life, Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine and books produced by the Valley Land Fund and Coastal Bend wildlife photo contest. His images are represented by the Alamy stock agency. His photo essay “Sundance” is in the ibooks store. His website is www.voyagerphotography.com.
Mike Rice grew up hunting, fishing, skiing and climbing in the mountains of northern New England. After spending his first 30-plus years following the jack-of-all-trades career program, he located to Boston’s south shore where he was introduced saltwater fly-fishing. In 2000 he started Mud Dog Saltwater Flies as a “full-time part-time” side business and has been tying flies for east coast fly shops and guides since. Rice wrote regularly for the now defunct Fly-fishing New England and Flyfishing Mid-Atlantic States magazines, has given presentations and tying lessons at fly shops and fishing clubs and is an ambassador for the American Museum of Fly Fishing. In 2013 he started his blog, http://backwaterflats.blogspot.com/ to tell the stories of the people, places and fish he encounters on the water. He looks forward to creating new relationships through the OWAA and developing his writing abilities and opportunities.
Since Lynn Starnes was a child with a Brownie camera, she has taken photographs of everyday moments. The difference is her everyday world is wilder than that of most Americans. She gets the most pleasure from tracking and photographing animals with a camera in their most calm, intimate moments. Starnes’ life work is a combination of aquatic ecology, in which she has a degree, and documenting that world in photographs. She worked for 38 years as a fisheries and wildlife biologist in a number of federal agencies. This academic background afforded her access to a wide variety of animals and habitats. She has tagged and released animals, conducted research, written peer-reviewed articles and managed programs conserving and enhancing animals and their habitat. She dedicated her life to wildlife and its habitat and continues in retirement. She feels more comfortable in the woods than in any city. She currently sells her photography in her gallery and on her website www.greatwildlifephotos.com.
Mary Terra-Berns is a biologist and freelance writer with a master’s degree in fish and wildlife sciences from Texas A&M University. She has worked on a variety of research and management projects focusing on rare species such as wolverines, Canada lynx, red-cockaded woodpeckers and many other species. As the environmental staff biologist for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game’s Panhandle Region, she was the primary technical writer and worked with other agencies and the public on wide ranging and complex land use issues. Terra-Berns has published several articles in Sandpoint Magazine, Bonners Ferry Living Local magazine and Idaho Game Warden Magazine. She’s also written numerous technical documents. As often as possible she is outside hiking, fly-fishing, running, biking, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing and traveling.

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Lake Superior: 3 quadrillion gallons, one great lake

OWAA Developer — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 17:39:15 +0000

Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area and the third largest by volume. It could hold all the water from the other Great Lakes, plus three more Lake Eries.
The clean and cold, massive body of water plays a central role in life in Duluth, Minnesota.
From mid-March to mid-January the Soo Locks are open and Lake Superior supports an active maritime industry. The “Great Lakes Bulk Cargo Capital” of Duluth/Superior is one of the busiest inland ports in the United States. Each year the port handles about 1,000 ships carrying 42 million tons worth $1.9 billion. The largest of these ships, the lakers, are typically 1,000 feet long and 105 feet wide. They can’t fit through the Welland Canal, so they will never ply the oceans. Mainly they carry coal and iron ore. Salties are oceangoing vessels. About 100 times per year a saltie makes the seven-day, 16-lock, 2,342-mile trip from the Atlantic Ocean through the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway to the Duluth/Superior Harbor to pick up grain, to drop off wind energy equipment, or other commerce.
The lake also impacts Duluth’s weather, as well as its business.
Of the roughly 30 inches of precipitation that hits the lake each year, most falls between May and October. Lake Superior can modify the daily weather through a phenomenon known as “lake effect.” Compared to inland temperatures, shoreline temperatures can be noticeably warmer in winter and much cooler in summer. This is because water is slower to absorb and release heat than land. The “lake effect” can also super-size storms by adding moisture and speed to wind passing over the lake.
The lake is managed through a binational agreement involving Canada and the United States, including Ontario, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.
[box size=”large” border=”full”]Lake Superior by the numbers

350 miles: Length of the lake.
160 miles: Breadth of the lake.
483 feet: Average depth.
1,332 feet: Maximum depth.
1,826 miles: Shorline length and about the distance from Duluth to Miami.
31,700 square miles: Total surface area, the same size as the state of Maine.
3 quadrillion gallons: Roughly the amount of water in the lake, enough to cover North and South America in about one foot of water.
10,000 years: Age of the lake making it a geological infant.
10 percent: Amount held of the world’s fresh surface water not frozen in a glacier or ice cap.[/box]

— Information from Visit Duluth

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Roots of the Sagebrush Rebellion

OWAA Developer — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 17:29:11 +0000

BY CHRIS MADSON
It was supposed to be for the common man. That’s what Thomas Jefferson thought when he forged the deal that made the 800,000 square miles of Louisiana Territory the property of the United States. “The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on,” he wrote to James Madison in 1785. “The small landowners are the most precious part of a state.”
But, in much of the interior West, Jefferson’s vision went largely unrealized. The American ideal, the democratic association of free men on free land, stalled in the Western wilderness.
The confrontation over federal land is older than the occupation at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, older than the face-off at Cliven Bundy’s ranch, older than the Sagebrush Rebellion that arose in the 1970s and the often heated debate over the Taylor Grazing Act in the 1920s and 1930s. It is a contest between greed and the public interest that stretches back to Lewis and Clark and the opening of the West.
It took a huge bank account and a focused mission to survive, let alone prosper, on these vast, untamed landscapes. That is why the West was opened, not by a few intrepid settlers, yearning to breathe free, but by a succession of well-funded companies that explored and exploited the frontiers and eventually stripped them of anything that could be converted to profit.
These days, we celebrate the free trapper as the apotheosis of American liberty. We choose to ignore the far-flung corporate conglomerates that forced their way into the heart of the continent: the Hudson’s Bay Company; the North West Company; the Missouri Fur Company; William Ashley’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company; and the powerful American and Pacific fur companies, formed and backed by the New York entrepreneur John Jacob Astor.
When Astor incorporated the American Fur Company in the spring of 1808, he invested $1 million in the firm. Soon thereafter, he established the Pacific Fur Company to exploit the fur trade between the Columbia River and the Far East, investing another $400,000 in that plan, which included the purchase of a new ship. The fur trade was big business.
The unrelenting pressure on furbearing animals, especially the beaver, had a predictable effect. As early as 1826, naturalist John D. Godman predicted that the beaver was headed for extinction. “A few individuals may, for a time, elude the immediate violence of persecution,” he wrote, but the species would eventually be lost “in the fathomless gulf of avarice.”
When beaver became scarce, the European market turned to other fibers to manufacture hats, and the great beaver hunt in the Rockies came to an end.
So ended the first great wave of development on the public domain in the American West. The beaver, whose pelts had built an empire, had been hunted to the brink of extinction. The men who had set the traps were gone, a large proportion of them the victims of violent deaths, the rest fading away on hardscrabble farms in Missouri or Ohio or Oregon as they mourned the passing of a life they loved and had spent their best years to destroy. The profit from 30 years of toil and danger was in New York and London, in the vaults of the big companies that had run the business. It was a pattern that would become all too familiar over the next century.
The beaver trade died just as American enthusiasm for the Elysian fields of Oregon began to take hold. In 1846, the United States finally settled the long-standing border dispute with Britain, and the boundary between the two nations was set on the 49th parallel. At the same time, the U.S. took almost half of Mexico by force, adding another 500,000 square miles to the public domain. California joined the union in 1850; Oregon followed in 1859, and visionaries began to talk about the need to tie the East and West together. Wagons and sailing ships weren’t enough, the thinking went. The solution was at hand, the miracle of the age: the railroad.
Congress authorized $93 million worth of bonds, with the principal and interest guaranteed by the federal government, to encourage the big rail companies to build the transcontinental lines. Why this outpouring of generosity? Our eighth-grade history books told us that it was a simple commitment to the idea that the nation should be united by rail, and there’s little doubt that a patriotic impulse was one of the motives the railroad magnates shared.
Another was sheer greed. The railroaders distributed $250,000 in bonds around Washington, D.C., to congressmen and other key officials who could help sweeten the deal. The bonds were worth nothing if the transcontinental line wasn’t built; they were worth plenty if it was.
State and federal governments were also generous with land grants. The railroads west of the Mississippi were given 175 million acres along potential routes. Combined with the control the railroads had over routes and choices of town sites, this allowed company insiders to reap huge profits in real estate.
The deals that were made to complete the three great transcontinental rail lines were “leveraged” to the hilt, which meant main players borrowed far more than they could pay back — unless the rail project yielded an immense profit — and many of them found ways to evade any personal financial responsibility to investors through limited liability corporations and other means. The key players in just the California part of the shell game that built the Union Pacific transcontinental line came away with $10 million in clear profit.
The chicanery, bribery and fraud eventually led to scandals. More than 30 members of Congress had taken gifts of shares from the company, but no one was indicted and only two members of Congress were even censured. The organizers at the California end of the line avoided a similar investigation when all the records of their finance and construction company were mysteriously destroyed in a fire.
The lack of adequate capital to back the rampant speculation surrounding the transcontinental railroads was largely to blame for the financial panic of 1873 and the six-year depression that followed. As always, the brunt of the downturn fell on people of modest means. More than 18,000 businesses closed their doors, small farms failed, and wages in the railroad sector and elsewhere were slashed.
It took more than 2,000 wooden ties to build a mile of track and at least 30 poles to string the telegraph line alongside. It’s been estimated that between 20 and 25 percent of all timber cut in the last third of the nineteenth century found its way into railroads. The demand was so intense that the mountains within 30 miles of the tracks in Wyoming were almost denuded. Ties floated down local streams wherever possible, scouring creek beds, which then became smothered with silt from the surrounding hillsides.
Once again, the common folk shouldered the brunt of the cost of the great project, in money, heartache and blood. The environment sustained a heavy blow, and a handful of wealthy speculators reaped the profit.
— Circle of Chiefs articles are written by those who have received the Circle of Chiefs Award for conservation reporting and coverage. The Circle of Chiefs are considered OWAA’s conservation council. The article reflects the opinion of the author. If you’d like to add to the discussion, please send a letter to the editor.
— Chris Madson is a freelance writer specializing in conservation and hunting subjects. He lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

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Living beyond lists

OWAA Developer — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 17:18:38 +0000

Miniuk-Sperry learns there’s more to life than success and failure

BY TAYLOR WYLLIE
From her perch on the small island, Colleen Miniuk-Sperry saw the glint of a silver boat. While her heart swelled with relief, physically she crumbled. The adrenaline that had gotten her here — safe, though stuck on a small piece of land outside the Forgotten Canyon — had been replaced by such deep-seated exhaustion, she began to sob.
She had been rescued.
Her November 2015 trip began as an ambitious adventure, a 14-day stand-up paddleboarding expedition spanning 147 miles across the Colorado River and Lake Powell with her mother, Jacque Miniuk, tagging along in a kayak. The two had it all planned, knowing where and when they’d sleep each night, monitoring the weather, and informing local friends about their whereabouts. They’d even gone on two test runs earlier that year.
The first three days had gone well. Or well enough. On day two the duo were rained out and spent the majority of their time marooned on a 300-foot island. But day three was perfect, blue skies, calm water, summer breeze despite it being November kind-of perfect.
But day four?
“All Hell broke loose,” Miniuk-Sperry said.
The water raged. Five- to six-foot swells swallowed her mother’s 20-foot ocean kayak for minutes at a time. A cross-breeze brought strong winds from side. The two battled it out for three hours and 15 miles. There was no place else to go. Giant cliff walls trapped Miniuk-Sperry and her mother on the river. They had to keep moving forward.
When they got to their intended destination at Forgotten Canyon, they weren’t able to find the campsite that had been promised by guidebooks. And they couldn’t go back.
“My mom is absolutely done,” Miniuk-Sperry said. “She’s just standing there, shaking.”
That’s when they saw the ranger in the silver boat and flagged him down. He had been making the rounds when he stumbled upon them, and warned them that the storm wouldn’t end for another five, six days at the earliest.
Their trip was over.
Miniuk-Sperry returned home and didn’t speak with anyone for the better part of a week.
Like everything else in life she’d meticulously planned the trip. But even with all the planning and foresight she’d found herself adrift, in need of rescue.

Corporate beginnings

For Miniuk-Sperry, 41, success can be broken into three distinct steps:
No. 1: Find a passion.
No. 2: Work harder than everyone else.
No. 3: Associate yourself with people more talented than you.
The formula has worked for her since childhood when the 5’11” woman excelled in gymnastics and volleyball. The latter carried her through all four years of college on a full-ride scholarship both at Stanford for one year and later the University of Michigan. She graduated with a degree in business administration computer information systems in 1997.
When she landed a job at Intel doing “everything, but coding,” she was living the quintessential American dream.
Only, she’d come home crying.
“Everybody gets in a routine,” her mother said. “I have to go to school. I have to go to college. I have to do this, I have to do that. Sometimes we forget there is something called love of life.”
Miniuk told her daughter she should try a hobby. She suggested photography.
Miniuk-Sperry signed up for an introductory class at a local community college in 2001, figuring she had nothing to lose.
Immediately, she signed up for four more.
Her favorite subjects immediately became landscapes and the outdoors. It offered her stress relief and a way to show her love of the places she traveled.
Photography became like volleyball in high school, or business school in college; she applied her formula, and success followed.
She quit her job at Intel to pursue photography full time on Feb. 28, 2007, a day she calls her personal independence day and which she celebrates each year like her birthday.
On the advice of established photographers, she went commercial her first year she started shooting full time. She earned good money, but she wasn’t feeling fulfilled by the images she created of architecture, food and the other subjects clients requested.
Then she came to her first OWAA conference in 2010 in Rochester, Minnesota. The late Jim Smith invited her to present on travel photography after she talked at his Grand Photo Club and the two bonded over their love of nature photography.
“It was like coming home to the mothership,” said Miniuk-Sperry, who has since served on the board of directors and is now the organization’s secretary.
At the conference she saw an entire community of people making money at what she had deemed the impossible — photographing the outdoors. She went home from the conference and dropped most of her commercial clients.
She’s now authored and photographed three books and an instructional e-book. Her work has appeared in magazines, calendars and on people’s walls as fine art.
“She really exploded onto the scene,” Paul Gill, a photographer who works closely with Miniuk-Sperry, said. “She understands the camera probably more than anyone I’ve ever known.”
Her brain’s ability to understand the technical aspects of a camera taught her one piece of photography. OWAA and a child taught her the other.

Experience lasts a lifetime

Miniuk-Sperry has always found peace in the rocky beaches, granite peaks and northern woodlands of Acadia National Park. She’s co-written books on the place and was an artist-in-residence at the park three times.
She also taught basic photo skills to kids in a residential education program she helped create in the park. It was while teaching kids she’d learn one of the most important lessons of her career: passion.
“This fourth or fifth grader, he loses his marbles,” Miniuk-Sperry said. “You’d think an alien spaceship landed.”
Instead he’d spotted a mushroom poking up from the ground. A mushroom he needed to photograph.
The kid was jealous of Miniuk-Sperry because he thought her job was going around finding these mushrooms and snapping a picture. Only, at this point, it wasn’t. She never felt as excited as that kid was over a mushroom.
“So what if I go around and start losing my marbles too,” she said she asked herself.
She now won’t take a photograph unless she feels that excitement. In her photography she’d found a way to blend her technical skills with passion. But in the rest of her life, she ignored the lesson from what she calls “The Mushroom Story” and lived by spreadsheets and detailed plans.
And then she ended up on an island in the middle of the Colorado River, crying to a park ranger. She’d planned the trip to every last detail and still she’d been bested by Mother Nature. And that was OK, and maybe what she needed.
The whole day was so formative and inspiring, she’s writing a book. In the week following the failed expedition, the week she originally blocked out to paddleboard, she wrote nearly half of the 53,000-word manuscript.
The part-memoir, part-adventure tale, will probably hit bookshelves in the spring of 2017. In it Miniuk-Sperry explores her recent ups and downs in life including a divorce and the infamous paddleboarding trip.
“I want people to be inspired and not really worry about success or failure,” she said.
Because to her that’s what life had always been about, that three step formula and only two outcomes, success or failure.
On the outside Miniuk-Sperry looks the same as she did a year ago. She keeps her dark hair cropped to her chin. She wears long flowing skirts. She often carries a camera. But observe her long enough and you might notice something different.
She stops to enjoy the world, smelling the trees, touching the bark.
“Achievement lasts 30 seconds,” Miniuk-Sperry said. “Experience lasts a lifetime.”
— Taylor Wyllie was an OWAA intern and is a student at the University of Montana, studying journalism and environmental studies. She’s worked for the independent student newspaper, The Montana Kaimin and her work has appeared on Montana PBS, Montana Public Radio and in the Missoulian.

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Capturing sound worth listening to

OWAA Developer — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 16:51:43 +0000

BY TAYLOR WYLLIE
On a recent episode of National Public Radio’s Radiolab, Anne Fernald, a psychology professor at Stanford, described sound as touch at a distance. You hear it because vibrations from sound waves hit the tiny hair cells in your inner ear, and you feel it, or feel something, when you really listen.
That feeling is one reason Jennifer Jerrett said she dedicated her life to sound as the science editor and media producer through Montana State University in Yellowstone National Park.
The sound professional spoke at OWAA’s annual conference held this year in July in Billings, Montana. She talked about sound’s intimacy, the importance of using the proper recording equipment and advice for recording in the field.
Don’t worry if you missed her presentation. Here are some of her top tips to keep in mind when you head into the field:

Signal-to-noise
This tip is as straightforward as they come. Make sure your recorder is close to your subject.
Composition
Think like a photographer and pay attention to your foreground and background. Think about what sound is in front of and behind your subject. When recording in the field, try and get multiple kinds of recordings. Go in close and get that specific bird call, then pull back and record the sounds of the entire ecosystem. This will add variety and context to your piece.
Ambience
Record the sounds of your space. If you go from an outside setting to an interview indoors, record a few seconds of the room before your interview begins. The ambient noise of a computer buzzing, or the air conditioning blowing, create a sense of place and a new scene. It will smooth out your transitions and it is easier on the ears.
Fashion
Wear quiet clothing and stand as still as possible. A recorder can pick up everything from your jacket fluttering in the wind, to the sound of your pants rubbing together. In order to have a clear, solid recording, minimize the extra noise and be aware of what you are wearing. Be wary of others’ fashion choices as well.
Grit
It can be easy to be discouraged in this field. You will have to make a lot of recordings that you hate, before you finally get one that you love.
Luck
Sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time. Other times not so much. Try setting up a recorder on a timer in active areas to increase your chances of recording something new and exciting.
Action
Record sound that tells a story. Try and capture interaction between animals, different species and the movement of entire ecosystems.
Safety
Recording in the field can bring you to remote places during times when predators are most active. Plus, you need to be quiet in order to get the best recordings. So be careful. Try to bring a partner with you into the field, carry bear spray and if it’s a dangerous situation, set up a recorder and record remotely.
Check out the National Park Service sound library (https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/photosmultimedia/soundlibrary.htm) to hear some of Jerrett’s recordings.

— Taylor Wyllie was an OWAA intern and is a student at the University of Montana, studying journalism and environmental studies. She’s worked for the independent student newspaper, The Montana Kaimin and her work has appeared on Montana PBS, Montana Public Radio and in the Missoulian.

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Photo workshop gives new perspective

OWAA Developer — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 16:45:00 +0000

BY KATY SPENCE
A photography enthusiast since grade school, I’ve taken classes, attended workshops and picked the brains of countless photographers as I’ve worked to improve my technical skills through the years.
Yet Ann and Rob Simpson still managed to teach me a few new things during their pre-conference photography workshop in July in Billings, Montana. Here are the new lessons I took away from the workshop.

The polarizing filter.
I’ll be honest, I keep the UV filter on my camera because I shoot outside a lot and there’s UV light outside, right? Right, but filters have so much more potential than being glorified lens protectors. Ann and Rob showed us an unfiltered photo of a caiman lounging on the shore. The intense midday light on its scales and on the shore destroyed any detail. The next photo, shot with a polarizing filter, was richer in color without harsh reflections. The ridges and grooves of each scale were sharp and visible. You could even see the color of its eyes. Set side-by-side, the two photos looked like a Photoshop before and after. The polarizing filter caught details that were blown out in the unfiltered photos. It’s a built-in tool to reduce harsh light and reflections, no post-production necessary.
The histogram.
Ann and Rob presented the histogram in a brand new way for me. The histogram is a tool for photographers to quickly assess their exposure without trusting their eyes and a misleading LCD screen. In the field, a bright or underlit screen may make your photos look properly exposed, but come post-production, you find them much darker or lighter than you expected. Quickly scanning your camera’s histogram after taking a photo ensures that you are getting the proper balance of darks, grays and lights in the image. But, the much-desired bell curve might not be appropriate for each photo, Rob said. Each photo will have a different amount of lights, darks and grays in it, and the histogram will reflect that. He said to be aware of the “devil zone,” which is at the far right of the histogram and indicates overexposed areas of the photo which will have no detail and cannot be fixed in post-production.
The hood.
I don’t like camera hoods. They don’t fit in my luggage, and they feel flimsy. I’m always afraid I’ll crush one in transit. But shooting at Pompeys Pillar with my UV filter creating sunspots in my lens converted me, especially when Ann came up and asked, “Where’s your hood?” I sheepishly smiled and held up my hand, which I’d been using to shade my lens like a person without a visor shields their eyes from the sun. She smiled and told me to always carry a hood. Your gear is supposed to be used. It does you no good sitting in your closet — or your office or wherever I left it — when you’re in the beautiful Montana wilderness. Ann and Rob said they don’t go anywhere without their hoods, and from now on, I don’t think I will, either. At least, I won’t as soon as I can find it.

— Katy Spence interned with OWAA in summer 2016. She is a journalism graduate student at the University of Montana. She enjoys new recipes, new places and old souls.

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Take better photos with these tips

OWAA Developer — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 16:35:35 +0000

BY GAIL JOKERST
Joan Miró once said, “You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”
Although he was best known for his paintings and sculptures, the truth behind them applies equally to photography.
That’s what I learned at OWAA’s 89th annual conference in Billings, Montana, this summer.
But that was just the beginning of the lessons I’d take away. Professional photographers led workshops and sessions for any conference attendees wanting learn the basics or improve their already developed techniques.
While a 600 mm lens certainly is a wise investment if you intend to portray wildlife — especially critters sporting antlers, horns and claws — in a natural setting, it isn’t necessary to take great pictures. Understanding some of the basic tenets of composition will help your pictures remain memorable for all the right reasons. Whether you are capturing scenes at a family reunion with your cell phone, or you’ve invested in the large lens and are watching wildlife, the following techniques can improve your results.

Seek complementary colors.
When possible, juxtapose color pairs opposite one another on the color wheel. For striking contrasts place red and green, blue and orange, or purple and yellow objects next to or near each other. This makes each color appear more intense and brighter.
Watch the light.
Take photos with the sun behind you and your shadow pointing in front of you. If the person you are photographing is wearing glasses, tilt the glasses slightly up or down to avoid potential glare from a flash or sunlight. If the person is wearing a hat, use your flash so it fills in shadows cast on the face.
Find shapes in nature.
Wedges, diagonals, ovals and curves add interest to photos. They engage the viewer to linger and look rather than scroll to the next frame. These shapes evoke a sense of movement and grab attention to follow each line to see where it goes. Triangular wedge imagery is a powerful compositional element as in the “V” formations commonly seen with airborne geese. Diagonal lines lead you into the picture with a sliding motion and create dramatic dynamics. Ovals gently draw the viewer’s eye around the image while C-curves add a graceful element. And S-curves — envision a winding river flowing from the lower corner of the photo and streaming back into the scene — create a feeling of depth and motion.
Avoid centering your subject.
This is also known as the rule of thirds. When looking through the viewfinder, imagine the scene before you overlaid with a nine-block grid. Rather than placing your main subject in the middle block, put it in one of the four spots where the lines of the grid intersect. This not only adds interest and balance to your composition, but also provides an opportunity to include more of the setting in front of or behind the main subject, which rounds out the scene for the viewer.
Never place the horizon in the middle.
Following the rule of thirds, horizons are most appealing when located in the upper or lower third of your picture. For a sunset photo where you want to show a widespread splash of color, place the horizon in the lower third. For a lake portrait featuring cloud reflections or submerged rocks, raise the horizon line to the upper third of the frame so the focus remains on the foreground. And wherever you place the horizon, it should be level.
The odds are better than the evens.
While you might expect the human eye to appreciate perfect symmetry in artwork, the opposite is true. We humans instinctively prefer compositions consisting of three, five, or seven focal points over those with two, four, or six elements. Odd numbers move the eye around the image better than even numbers and add appeal to your compositions.
Notice your background.
Don’t include anything in the frame that is not needed to deliver your visual message. Extraneous elements distract the viewer. Additionally, make sure nothing in your background, like a branch behind someone’s head, could be interpreted by the human eye as piercing that individual’s head. If you fill your frame with your subject, this is less likely to occur.
Less can be more.
Sometimes you may want to show part rather than all of an element in your photo. The human eye will compensate for the omission and complete the picture for the viewer so you need not show an entire arm or plate of food. If you “amputate” an arm or leg, do it right below the joint.
The eyes have it.
Focus tightly on the subject’s eyes so they are clearly visible even if the rest of the head or body is not sharp. Likewise, if you have prominent text in the image, it must be sharp. Out-off-focus lettering and eyes disorient the viewer. If several of your subjects have eyes, the most important ones to keep in focus are those of the main subject. The rest need not comply with this rule.
Try a Dutch tilt.
This camera shot is useful when you want to add interest or possibly tension to a simple composition. As a general rule, angles create energy. Rather than taking the picture straight up as the eye sees the scene, tilt your camera at an angle so that the shot is composed with vertical lines angling to one side of the frame.To create photos you are proud to show and share obviously requires more than mere luck. It takes concentration plus a passionto lasso the image that has prompted you to pick up your camera, iPad, or cell phone.
To again quote Joan Miro, “The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.”

— A five-time Excellence in Craft Award winner from West Glacier, Montana, Gail Jokerst has been an OWAA member since 2000. She spends as much time as possible hiking and photographing in nearby Glacier National Park. Visit her website at www.gailjokerst.com.

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The business of the outdoor essay

OWAA Developer — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 16:26:33 +0000

BY CHRIS MADSON
Once upon a time, the personal essay was a staple of periodical literature, but even in just my lifetime that has changed. These days, many magazines have whittled the essays they run down to an editorial of 300 words opposite the table of contents and a regular column or two. The editorial is always written by a staffer. All too often, it’s not really an essay at all, just an ad for the current issue’s content. The columns may or may not be essays— if they are, they are constrained by the limited space they occupy as well as the views of the publisher.
There are a few big magazines that specialize in running essays. A handful even run an occasional outdoor essay. Several of John McPhee’s books on outdoor subjects began as essays for The New Yorker. I’m flabbergasted to find an outdoor essay now and then in The Atlantic, and a few of the major American newspapers that remain run the odd outdoor essay in their Sunday editions.
With these observations in mind, I’ve come to a couple of conclusions about essays in the big periodical markets.
First, it’s probably pointless to query an essay. It’s a lot like querying humor or poetry — the editor’s decision to buy depends mostly on the execution of the idea, not the quality of the idea in the abstract. All of us who freelance have been cautioned to never submit a manuscript; always query first. Like so many other pieces of good advice, this one has several unspoken caveats, one of which is that you can’t sell an essay with a query.
Second, when the big markets buy an essay, they’re buying the author at least as much as they’re buying the words. In a moment of supernatural clarity, you may have discovered “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything,” but you’re going to have trouble selling the resulting essay to The New Yorker unless your name is Truman Capote.
The situation in newspapers seems even more extreme. The big dailies keep a few commentators around, a group of the anointed whose names are household words and whose ranks will not be swelled by some unknown from Spotted Horse, Wyoming. Circumstances on the outdoor beat are even more difficult. The outdoor pages are steadily melting into the classified ads as corporate owners insist, all evidence to the contrary, that nobody reads articles on hunting, fishing, hiking or other outdoor sports anymore.
Of course, in this era of multimedia, there are other ways of publishing essays. My sense is that the dialogue of ideas that was a staple of periodicals has migrated into books.
If you are blessed with unusual insight into modern politics or modern psychological disorders — which may amount to much the same thing — you may be well on your way to a paying career as an essayist in book form. If you are unfortunate enough to write essays about the outdoors, your chances are not nearly so good.
If you still have access to a real, live, brick-and-mortar bookstore, take a look at the shelf space reserved to the general topics of the outdoors, nature, hunting, fishing, birding, camping and associated subjects. Compare this square footage with the space allotted to self-help, fantasy and romance novels. The difference is a good indicator of the market potential for a collection of outdoor essays.
There is, of course, one other medium worth considering here, that avalanche of “content”— as a writer, I can barely describe how I loathe that term—out on the Internet. The various sites and services available online have become by far the world’s largest publishers of the essay. All a would-be essayist needs to expose his work to the public is a computer, a link to the web and something to say.
The good news about web publishing is that we can all avoid those frustrating correspondences with editors who, as every writer has concluded, wouldn’t know a fine piece of writing if it came with a certificate from the Nobel Prize committee. The bad news is that it may be even harder to get paid for an online piece than it is for one that appears in print.
In 2011, the company Technorati reported that only 4 percent of bloggers consider revenue from their blogs as their “primary source of income.” It’s worth noting that only a small proportion of bloggers— 18 percent— are trying to make a living with their blogs. However, even in this group of professionals, only 37 percent see their blogs as their “primary source of income.”
In 2013, the folks at Technorati looked more carefully at bloggers they classified as “influencers.” This is an even more restrictive classification than “professional blogger.” Influencers are bloggers who can demonstrate reasonable traffic on their sites and even a certain minimal effect their blogs have on readers and their buying decisions.
According to Technorati, 64 percent of these influencers said they make money. Half of that group reported income of less than $1,000 a year; another 20 percent reported income between $1,000 and $5,000. Only 11 percent reported income of more than $30,000 a year. Most of that revenue comes from ad sales in the form of banners or text ads.
Blogs that post daily content have significantly higher traffic than blogs that post only once a week. Since the optimum length for a blog post is around 1,500 words, the volume of writing required is staggering, even greater than the amount daily news people once churned out. Bloggers, like me, who post once every two or three months, can expect the kind of traffic I see on my site. Sometimes, I may get 60 or 70 readers with a new post.
A growing number of magazines are establishing themselves online and expanding the market for outdoor essays. Since an online publication isn’t limited by space in the way print publications are, there’s one less obstacle for an essay to clear with editors. Unfortunately, that obstacle is replaced with another: the shortened attention span of the typical Internet surfer. As I see it, long-form essays are no more welcome on most electronic sites than they are in print publications.
Many writers consider their blogging and contributions to the social media as advertising for their efforts in other media. That’s at least part of the reason I continue to blog and post on social media. There’s also the hard fact that I can’t find another home for some of the pieces I write. If there’s no market for an essay, I’m probably better off posting it than throwing it in the trash.
I’m doing shorter bits on Facebook these days, micro-essays that I hope fit the reading habits of the typical Facebook visitor. There are sometimes as many as three or four dozen people who at least do me the favor of clicking “Like” on one of these from time to time.
Have these posts helped my “brand?” I have no idea. Have they helped me sell material in more traditional markets? I can’t say. If I were a better businessman, I’d make a greater effort to answer these questions, although I suspect I would find that the measurable return doesn’t justify the effort.
So why, with all these difficulties, does any professional ever bother with outdoor essays?
I imagine most of us who put words to paper have a deep, if insecure, regard for our own views, even if some of those are unmarketable. Sometimes we write first and look for markets later. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of that unsold work is our very best.
Sometimes, an idea is simply struggling to get out. It finds its way up through the mists and unformed apprehensions that pass as thought in the human mind, crystallizing at a moment of its own choosing, often unexpected, nearly always inconvenient, since it is likely to interfere with far more efficient ways of generating income. You may be better at ignoring these ideas than I am. If not, you have very little choice: Write first, sell later.
— Chris Madson is a freelance writer specializing in conservation and hunting subjects. He lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

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