Featured Artist Michael Easton

Canadian photographer Michael Easton is fascinated with the natural world. Enjoy his portfolio and find more of his work by visiting his website.

Photography and sharing images is a way of life which I have followed for over 40 years. From my early years as a Naturalist in the BC Provincial Parks system, I developed a strong desire to relate my excitement over little vignettes of nature and the inherent interactions of life that occur in these microcosms.

One of my earliest photographic inspirations in this realm was the work of Eliot Porter, one of the founders of the Sierra Club. My goal is to help people reconnect with nature through living with imagery that draws them in to a positive relationship with the natural environment, its inherent beauty and its absolute necessity for attaining peace of mind. I have always wanted to portray my imagery in the best possible way and bring the environment to the viewer who is often an urban dweller with limited access to undisturbed nature. To me this process requires suitable image quality in order to enable the different layers of nature appreciation to be considered.

The wilderness spaces that I find and the feelings that are transmitted to me are captured in my fine prints. Whether on fine art paper or fused in glass, my images have an archival quality of many hundreds of years which I find satisfying because my work can keep on delivering the message from nature long after I am gone.

I am currently exploring spring from a mossy perspective. Lately this has also included red cedar bark, mushrooms and arbutus trees. The latter has very unusual bark which peels off to reveal a red underbark and a bright yellow trunk. This stuff looks fabulous in black and white. Watch for this work to appear soon on my website.

I get so darn excited every time I go for a walk in the forest early in the morning on a cloudy calm spring day. Under these conditions any image is possible in the old cycle of newly emerging life. The leaves and flowers are perfectly still and a 10” time exposure with maximum depth of focus is possible. The freedom of the early morning diminishes dramatically when the slight breezes start. My work is then constrained to objects that don’t move – like tree trunks and rocks. But these also can be inspiring and exciting. Inspiration can greet the prepared mind almost anywhere.