The
presenters.

David Kingham is an artist who uses photography to express the beauty and emotions inspired by the natural world. His work, characterized by intimate landscapes and evocative compositions, invites viewers to experience profound feelings through his unique vision of wild places.

David’s artistic approach centers on expressing emotions through his photographs of nature’s grand vistas and quiet corners. Whether working in vibrant color or nuanced black and white, he creates compelling images that convey awe, tranquility, and wonder. His versatility allows him to choose the medium that best expresses the mood and essence of each scene as he perceives it.

Sharing his passion and ongoing artistic journey is integral to David’s practice. With his partner Jennifer Renwick, he leads immersive workshops across the western United States through their venture, Exploring Exposure. These experiences go beyond teaching technical skills, helping fellow artists discover their unique vision and developing an expressive style.

David emphasizes creative techniques that enhance images’ emotive quality while maintaining authenticity. He views his art as a process extending from initial conception to final presentation.

Embracing a nomadic lifestyle, David and Jennifer travel in an RV, allowing them to deeply connect with the landscapes that inspire their art. This perpetual journey fuels David’s creativity and enriches his ability to express emotions through his photographs of each place he experiences.

Through his evocative imagery and passionate teaching, David Kingham continues to explore the expressive potential of nature-based photographic art. His work invites viewers and students to see the world through his perspective and, more importantly, to feel the profound connection between humanity and the natural world he expresses through his art.

Jennifer Renwick is a Colorado-based nature photographer, but for the past eight years, she has traveled the American West in a travel trailer with her partner, fellow photographer David Kingham, capturing diverse landscapes from behind her lens and teaching photography workshops in national parks and wilderness areas. Leaving behind her background in geology and veterinary medicine, Jennifer embraced a more creative life, blending her love for nature with her artistic vision to reveal the subtle stories landscapes hold.

Her passion lies in uncovering the narratives and often overlooked details of these wild places. She practices slow photography, focusing on visual storytelling and capturing the emotions of a scene, with a particular emphasis on creating and curating photography projects. She uses keen observation to guide her camera toward the nuances and textures of the natural world. Whether photographing dolphins gliding through the ocean or documenting the abstract beauty of desert formations, her goal is to create images that not only evoke emotion and share stories but also raise awareness of the fragile beauty of the environment.

Jennifer also brings her passion into her workshops, teaching students how to slow down and connect more deeply with their subjects, fostering a sense of connection that enhances their visual storytelling and personal expression.

Her work has been featured in several prominent photography publications, including LensWork, Landscape Photography Magazine, Outdoor Photographer, On Landscape, and LensWork’s Seeing in Sixes photography books.

Bruce is an independent photographer, art educator and MPS founder. He lives in Moab and refers to the rest of the Colorado Plateau as his “backyard.” A lifetime of hiking and living in this landscape imbues his images with a unique intimacy. With a long list of publications behind him, including 2 NPS interpretive shows, 12 books by commercial publishers featuring his work only, and an additional 15 self-published books at blurb.com, Hucko is now quite content to be creating images solely for himself. Whether in color or BW, Hucko makes images that employ his mantra of “employ the external landscape to express the internal landscape.” His other life as “Art Coach!” to Navajo, Pueblo and Moab elementary school children for 40+ years brings a deep understanding of art and a patient ability to impart his visual literacy skills to students.

When not in the field or resolving images and printing them at home he can be found reading, writing, sipping a good tequila or dining and wining with a few friends.

Colleen Miniuk (she/her), also known to many as “Bubbles,” is a dynamic and passionate outdoor photographer, writer, educator, speaker, and publisher based in Chandler, AZ, on the ancestral homelands of the Hohokam. In 2007, she left behind her corporate career to follow her love for the outdoors and photography. With an adventurous spirit, today her work reveals a deep emotional resonance and creative connection with the land (and water!).

Colleen’s images have graced the pages of publications such as National Geographic, Arizona Highways, AAA Via, On Landscape, National Parks Traveler, and a broad variety of other outlets.

In addition to her photography, Colleen is a prolific writer and author. She has penned several books, including Photographing Acadia National Park: The Essential Guide to When, Where and How (after serving thrice as Acadia’s Artist-in-Residence), Wild in Arizona: Photographing Arizona’s Wildflowers; and The Current Flows: Water in the Arid West. Her first adventure travel memoir, So Said the River: Life, Loss, and Pie on the Colorado, was published in July 2024. She served as the publisher for Guy Tal’s Another Day Not Wasted and Bruce Taubert’s Wild in Arizona: Photographing Arizona’s Wildlife. She writes an online photography advice column called “Dear Bubbles.”

As a fervent advocate for creative expression, Colleen is just as enthusiastic about teaching as she is about creating. She leads photography workshops (including all-women sessions called Sheography™), teaches classes, and offers one-on-one mentoring. Her workshops invite curiosity, provoke thought, foster personal connection to the natural world, and empower photographers to find their unique voice.

When she’s not photographing, writing, or teaching, she’s camping in her Alaskan Camper, stand-up paddleboarding, rafting, making sand or snow angels, recording dance videos, painting, sipping bubbly (e.g. Prosecco), wandering, wondering, and living her big Life with a capital L.

Michael E. Gordon is an award-winning photographic artist best known for his black-and-white impressions of California’s deserts which, said Broughton Quarterly, portray “stunning ethereal beauty from terrain where others see only a bleak landscape.” A lifelong student of nature and wilderness, Michael’s intimate relationship with the natural world yields quiet images of depth and discovery.

Michael’s photographs and articles have been published in and on the covers of numerous magazines, newspapers, and textbooks, such as LensWork; Elements; Medium Format; On Landscape; Outdoor Photographer; SHOTS; Backpacker; B+W Photography (UK); Arte Fotográfico; View Camera magazine; Rangefinder; The Wilderness Society; and many more. His work has been widely exhibited, and his fine art prints are held internationally in the private collections of the United States Embassy, Kaiser Permanente; Milken Family Foundation; The Wilderness Society, and many others. Awards and recognition include International Photography Awards, Prix de la Photographie, Paris, and Black & White Spider Awards.

In 2015, Michael was featured as an on-camera Death Valley expert in an NHK Japan full-length documentary film.

Michael’s love for and commitment to the preservation of imperiled landscapes in California and the American West reaches beyond his photography. His 20-year service as volunteer ranger in the San Gorgonio Wilderness earned him a President’s Gold Volunteer Service award, and he has also served on the Board of Directors for the San Gorgonio Wilderness Association. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Mojave National Preserve Conservancy.

His photographs have been instrumental in the campaigns of The Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, Campaign for America’s Wilderness, and National Parks Conservation Association, and have helped to shape wildfire management, public lands policy, renewable energy policy, and Wilderness and National Monument designation and expansion.

Michael leads numerous photo workshops and tours each year for photographers of all skill levels and is a staff instructor for The Los Angeles Center of Photography. He also owns and operates Death Valley Photo Tours and Great Printer Profiles.

Michael prefers to live out of doors but keeps a house in Southern California with his wife Shauna, and is held hostage by numerous feline companions.

I am a landscape photographer who works primarily in black and white. The landscape moniker, while the most accurate, evokes unfair and incorrect expectations of mountain panoramas or sunset vistas. Neither occupy much space in my collection. Instead, my photographs are more direct, stark, simple, and quiet.

I began my career as a newspaper photojournalist and photo editor. It was during this time that I, along with three of my colleagues, was named as a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography. After almost 20 years working at daily newspapers across four different states, I left to work in the more peaceful life of higher education.

During these years as a staff photographer, I spent an increasing amount of time photographing the landscapes near where I lived. As my day job photographs were mostly in color and prominently featured people, my personal work was in black and white and devoid of living, breathing people, although I did often share their presence.

This delineation between my work pictures and my personal photographs was essential to keep the creative spirit alive. However, there is no denying the influence that photojournalism has upon my personal work. I strive to include narratives, stories, within my photographs which offer the viewer far more than what is contained in the composition. I react strongly to the juxtapositions near where nature and man coexist (or collide), which is where I find the greatest significance.

Today I devote myself full-time to photographing the landscape in my unique, personal style. I prefer to work in areas devoid of obvious grandeur or explicit beauty, even if surrounded by such splendor. I prefer the flat and reticent prairies to the grandiosity of mountain ranges, and the stark high desert to slot canyons. I am most comfortable, and at my most creative, in areas which are quiet and open. The areas in-between.

My monograph, Manzanar: Echoes of Lost Memories, was published as a hard-cover book and took first place for professional self-published books at the International Photography Awards. My photographs have also been shown in solo exhibitions across the United States.

Brooks Jensen, editor of LensWork, has been generous enough to call me “perhaps one of the most sensitive and creative and terrific photographers of our generation.”

I’m a professional photographer specializing in landscapes and nature, and the author and/or principal photographer of five books and several ebooks, including Digital Landscape Photography: In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Great Masters; The Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite; and three books in the Yosemite Meditations series.

I’ve written numerous magazine articles on the art and technique of photography, and my images have been published in over thirty countries around the world, in publications like National Wildlife, Outdoor Photographer, American Photo, Sunset, and Texas Highways. My work has received numerous awards, including the North American Nature Photography Association’s 2023 award for Fine Art in Nature Photography. I’ve lived in or near Yosemite National Park since 1983, and currently reside just outside the park in Mariposa, California.

I love photography, and love helping other passionate photographers express their vision through my workshops, online courses, and blog. Over the years I’ve taught more than 200 workshops, on subjects ranging from landscape and night photography to image processing and printing.

I tell students that we don’t photograph objects — we photograph the light reflected off of them. A great subject in poor light will make a poor photograph; an ordinary subject in great light can make a great one. That radiant energy comes mostly from the photographer, or from the interaction between the photographer and the subject.

Some photographers have a uniform, recognizable style. I’m not one of them — it seems limiting to photograph the world only one way, so I’ve developed several distinct bodies of work, including surreal nighttime images, delicate high-key work, and classic landscape photographs. Despite the differences in style, the subject is always nature, and my main tool is light. Light is what allows me to create a mood, whether that mood is lyrical, playful, or mysterious.

Stephanie Johnson is a self-taught creative photographer who uses camera-based digital techniques, such as Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) and Multiple Exposure (ME), as well as analog techniques, such as cyanotypes, as forms for artistic expression.

She has a deep passion for crafting distinctive and abstract imagery that reflects her connection to the natural world through her unique artistic vision.

As a visual artist, she is constantly seeking to push the boundaries of her creativity by evolving her processes, techniques, and stylistic approaches to make the unknown essence of nature known through light and emotion.