Words
Good photographs speak for themselves, and there is not much that words can add. At least I can’t put into words what these pictures are about. That’s why I take them.
I can tell a little about the circumstances under which they were taken and about the photographer, in case you are interested. On something like my 10th birthday my father gave me a camera and a beginner’s darkroom kit. Within a year I had a color darkroom running (no mean feat in the mid 1950s when color chemicals were toxic and temperature precision had to be better than a half degree F). By the time I arrived at high school I was quite the precocious photographer and went on to win prizes in the Kodak High School Contest three of the four years. Photography was largely displaced by the demands of college and graduate school and the early years of a scientific life in high energy physics. Sometime in the 1970s Madeleine, on the way to becoming a Time Magazine Senior Correspondent, suggested we take a break in the Yucatan, and the travel bug took over. Every year or two we were off to wonderful places where the people were always welcoming, often despite living in difficult conditions. Many of them became subjects of photographs. Some of these travels resulted in stories, written by Madeleine and accompanied by my photographs, for the Chicago Tribune and Time. For the last five years I have been able to split my time between photography and physics research. Assignments from Smithsonian Magazine and Time have taken us to especially remote places (Western Tibet, the South Pole and the Dry Valleys of Antarctica). In 2007 a chance to go to the Pantanal in Brazil resulted in a big spread in the New York Times on the conflict between jaguars and ranchers. In June 2008 High Country News, a small high quality magazine devoted to covering the Western US, sent us to the Big Horn Basin in Wyoming for a story on paleontologists digging in the 55.5 million year old soil layers of a climate warming period, much like our own. In spring 2009 we covered the critically endangered Bay checkerspot butterfly on Coyote Ridge above San Jose for High Country News.
These pictures were all taken with Nikons (Nikkormats, F3, F5, D2X, and now a D700) and Nikon lenses. The equipment has proven to be extremely robust, in sea kayaks in the arctic ice, at -40° at the South Pole, hanging out a helicopter for hours in Antarctica (-20°F), on horseback at 115°F (46°C) in Brazil, at 123°F (51°C) in Death Valley,in the sand at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and in Botswana, in steaming humidity (Amazon, Borneo, Angkor, Sri Lanka, ...), at 19,000’ (5800 m) in the Andes and Tibet. Nikon recently granted me an NPS card (for high priority repair and loaners) probably in recognition of this experience, even if I have barely needed the service to date. Chromes were scanned with Nikon scanners (LS5000), until the TIbet expedition when I went digital. These days I do most post-processing in Lightroom, previously in Aperture, going out to Photoshop or NX2 for special adjustments. Before Aperture, all pictures were edited in Photoshop.
Images and site ©Thomas Nash 2010 or year indicated. All rights reserved,
Tear sheets, © by respective publications, are posted here under fair use and require password to print.
All pictures get some implicit or explicit tonal and color adjustments. There are no absolutes in the visual space. I try to get images close to what I remember - and the colors of my memory are colored by emotional reactions to what was getting my attention when I took the picture. Rarely (never for photojournalist work), I will touch up an image to remove something distracting. Many images are cropped to focus them on what mattered.
My images have been published by Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Smithsonian Magazine,
Kodak, CNN, BBC, The Weather Channel, Panorama (Italy), Cosmos (Australia), Prentice Hall, High Country News, ...