In this centennial year of Rocky Mountain National Park, Barry Petersen found a celebrated Nature photographer hard at work, going back in time:
In a crowded world of honking horns and cubicle offices, nature can be heart-stopping.
So think how lucky John Fielder is. He’s perhaps Colorado’s premier nature photographer. And you could say a place like Rocky Mountain National Park is HIS office.
“I never get tired of being in places like this,” Fielder said. “It’s my medicine. I’ve been to the park 100 times in the last 40 years. And it gets better, actually, each time that I come here.”
Over the last 40 years, his llamas packed with camera gear, he has hiked or climbed or crawled looking for the next perfect shot … capturing Nature’s majesty or man’s footprint.
A fence made of aspen trees … a ranch nestled deep in a valley.
“When I’m alone, I think I can experience, to a deeper degree, the sensuousness of Nature, not just these views, but again, the sounds and the smells, the taste, the touch of these grasses.”
“He’s Colorado’s photographer,” said Connie Rudd, one of the aspiring photographers who flock to his workshops.
“John Fielder’s work is amazing. It’s inspirational,” said Jamie Richards. “And it can speak to anyone in any corner of the United States, or the world.”
Or come to his gallery, where the lesson is that you cannot hurry the pursuit of beauty.
Fielder showed Petersen his image of the North Fork of the Gunnison country. “This took me about a dozen trips to get this photo,” he said. “So every year I would go to this location, look at the quality of the aspen trees. It was never right. And finally, after 12 visits, I finally got it at its perfect moment.”
A 12-years-in-the-making picture.
But one of his most famous projects was actually a century in the making. Fielder found a kindred soul, photographer William H. Jackson. With his 350 pounds of gear, Jackson was hired by the Federal government to photograph his way across the state in the 1870s.
Jackson shot 10,000 pictures of Colorado, many archived at Denver’s History Colorado Center. Fielder chose 300, and went hunting for the same spots.
Some were easy, like Aspen in its early prospector heyday … and now, actually less populated a century later.
Or railroad tracks, now back to Nature.
But sometimes he needed patience, strong legs, and a precise sense of geography to find the more remote areas. It created a book that became a bestseller.
But the decades have changed Fielder. He still finds calm here — but now, apprehension.
“Well, Nature is challenged more than ever these days,” he said. “We’ve got a warming planet. We soon will have nine billion people on the planet visiting places like this. We need to protect it.”
That’s what drove President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Wilderness Act 50 years ago, protecting America’s outdoors.
To celebrate that anniversary, Fielder hit the road for a year showing his pictures, selling his books, working up to this night matching John the photographer with that other Colorado John, John Denver — his music played by the John Adams Band.
It filled a downtown Denver concert hall — the wonder of Nature, with a warning.
“Nature is being lost very quickly because of climate change,” said Fielder. “And I want to be a part of the community of people that truly care about four billion years of the evolution of life on Earth.
“And one of the best ways to share with people how special this is and why it needs to be protected forever is through photography.”
© 2015 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Article contains gorgeous photographs and wonderful music!
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/colorado-through-john-fielders-lens/
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HOW TO KILL THE ALBUM: STOP MAKING SENSE
We need to have a little word about your language.
The mainstream audience that the music biz so desires thinks that ‘curation’ has something to do with preserved ham.
A ‘playlist’ remains a relic they stuck onto a cassette in a bid to win the affection of their teenage sweetheart.
And as for ‘streaming equivalent sales’… well, let’s reserve some special ire for that particularly mindless semantic fiasco.
First, an earnest appeal: I am seriously concerned that this industry is starting to throttle its potential with a vocal addiction to nonsense.
As a direct consequence, it’s showing scant respect to its best and most lucrative product.
This situation is being exacerbated by hereditary commercial models continuing to be measured in ‘albums’ – especially artist contracts and the archaic bonus structure of the industry’s big earners.
Ironically, it’s an attitude that’s doing great harm to the one format that still pays most people’s wages.
According to IFPI stats run through the MBW calculator, on-demand streaming’s total contribution to the global record industry last year, across freemium and subscription, was $2.2bn.
That amounted to around a quarter of the money generated from album sales ($8.4bn). That’s real, actual, transactional album sales.
You wouldn’t know it to earwig most modern label conversations, but physical album sales alone actually accounted for 53% of 2014’s total sales/on-demand streaming cash haul.
It’s therefore something of a worry to consider the shabby treatment the LP is currently being subjected to around these parts – and the recklessness with which the language and mathematics of streaming are been imposed upon it.
The US market is the most heinous example, where repeated streams of a single track are officially now counted as ‘album equivalent’ sales.
Oddly, Billboard actually seems quite proud to have bastardised the one music format that the public is spending most of its money on.
When it announced the alteration to its historic Billboard 200 chart in November, the publication wrote:
“Current artists likely to benefit from this change in methodology include Ariana Grande, Hozier and Maroon 5… as their streaming and digital song sales have been outperforming their album sales in recent weeks.”
So their song sales have been outperforming their album sales, but it’s best if we attribute them with more album sales than artists who actually achieved more album sales.
Gotcha. Crystal. Flawless logic.
As Martin Mills eloquently put it earlier this year: “Including tracks with albums mixes apples with pears, and fails to chart anything meaningful other than sheer brute size.”
Somehow, this has been deemed more progressive than simply allowing the album a graceful plateau into less relevant sales territory.
Right then, shall we illustrate the self-evident lunacy of ‘streaming equivalent albums’?
Please, take a moment to read those three words back.
They are a telling indication of just how messed up this business has become – and of its stark refusal to accept that an entirely new model can only be properly evaluated through entirely new methods.
Imagine if other businesses simply refused to treat groundbreaking technologies any differently than their previous incarnations.
I am writing this with my keyboard-equivalent quill, and I should imagine you’re reading it on your screen-equivalent parchment.
By Tim Ingham
Read the rest of the article, containing graphs and charts, here:
http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/how-to-kill-the-album-stop-making-sense/
[Thanks to Steve Garvan, http://www.garvanmanagement.com, for forwarding this article.]
[…] By Barb Dye […]