 I want to thank you all very much for coming out. All the challenges, parking, driving, protests, and everything, Super Bowl. It's so nice to see so many of you here. We were here at about 2 o'clock, and there were two people here. And we're going, oh my gosh, here we're doing a slideshow. So it just means so much for you to share your Saturday with us. And we're going to do our best to give you some of the beauty that we've seen across the state. And we will do a little bit of talking, and mostly letting you see what we've done. Oh, the other, the third party. This is Zorro. He's my art critic and spiritual advisor. And he goes with us on all our photo trips. He looks through the camera and tells me left, right, upside down. So he's an important part of our project here. So you have that. So this was a 17-year journey that started actually with the inspiration for this was 24 years ago, when I went down to the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve in the Antelope Valley, which is about an hour north and east of Los Angeles, met a woman, a friend of mine at a lab in San Francisco, back when we were doing film. She said, I'm going down to the Poppy Reserve. You want to go down? I'm sure you've been there before. I said, no, no. She said, you're a landscape photographer. You haven't been down to the Poppy Reserve. What's wrong with you? So she said, you have to go. So I went down. This was a really, really good year after five bad years. To have blooms like this, you need a combination of events. The rains have to come at the right time. The temperatures have to happen. It can't be too windy when the blossoms are on the plants. It can't be too dry. It can't be too hot. So these beautiful blooms that we're going to show you all happen because of a convergence of weather and climate events. So I was down here photographing. I'm calling Nita. And I'm saying, you have to come down and see this. So I drove all the way back home, got her, brought her back down. We spent days photographing this. It's a really interesting area in that the Mojave Desert is that way. The coast is that way. You've got a lot of wind coming in from the coast out into the desert. So what happens is the first day I was back here was so windy, I couldn't photograph. These little hummocks are protecting the flowers from the wind. You can see that most of the flowers are closed up. That's because the flowers close up in the wind, and they close up at night, and they close up on cloudy days. So the one area where you see the blossoms are actually open are on the lee side of these little hills. So I came back two days later after going climbing a Joshua tree and got basically two images out of a whole series of exposures on a roll of film, two that were good where the motion was actually stopped. So I want to back up a little bit. Joan gave you a little bit of our bio, but I want to give you a little more. When Rob and I met and we met in a photo lab in San Francisco, I was a people photographer. That's one of my photos from the first children of the Tenderloin exhibit. And as Joan said, 30 years ago in September, that exhibit opened. And we're actually using some of the same frames from that exhibit in this exhibit. So it was quite interesting to be exchanging them out from Tenderloin to flowers. And Rob's focus was on nature and landscape photography. As time passed, we started working together on a wildflower project. And Nita and I worked together. We sleep together. We eat together. We are in each other's space 94 hours a day. And so five couple counselors and 30 years later, we're still together. And we made it through this exhibit, which is amazing. This is the earliest picture taken in 1984. This is the earliest dated picture in the exhibit. This is a California buckeye tree. They're looping in the foreground. And that's where it sort of started. But it really started, like I said, with a poppy reserve in 1992. And because of Rob's love of this planet, he started working on environmental issues. This was part of a series on mining on public land. And he was invited to go to Washington DC to speak at the National Press Club for the Sierra Club to try to change the 1872 mining law to support the mining law reform that President Clinton at the time was trying to put through. So just for a sense of scale, can you go back? That waste rock pile is 200 feet high. So this is what's happening on public lands, all this mining to get gold. Anyway, I could talk about that forever, but let's go. So I've dealt with water issues. And the smoke you see overhead is from the California Zaka fire, a wildfire fire in 2007. So Nita and I spent about a week documenting that fire. The cloud is what's creating the color of the light. There was a smoke plume going 40 miles from the fire all the way back to Bakersfield. So this was the environmental work that I've been doing as well. And as Joan mentioned, I was a firefighter. When I left college, I had gotten a degree at Clark University in biology and came out here. And decided to explore some different jobs. And one of them was being a firefighter. And this was one of the photos I took while on duty. I kept a little Raleigh on my belt and actually won an award with an Icon International Competition for this photo. So that was very encouraging. And as I mentioned, the Children of the Tenderloin Project, which started out as a three month project and a year and three months later, we had a book and a major exhibit. So Sue, you thought we put a lot of time into this one? And it really showed me the power of photography and how this really helped this neighborhood. And I started to get known nationally for the work I did with children and was invited to do the Children's Defense Fund calendars. And this was, they were hand colored by Teya Shrak. This was a powwow actually here in San Francisco at San Francisco State. And one of the things we've been having fun with is working with our images. We actually got them to be eight feet tall by 20 feet wide. And you can see them at Kaiser Hospital. So the work we've been selling lately to healthcare institutions has kept us going and allowed us to keep working on our Wildflower Project. We've been fortunate to find an art consultant who's putting a lot of our work into different healthcare places. And it's given us money to keep going, photographing, we're going to be spending probably a couple months this summer completing the last three of the Western States for our Wildflower Project and book Beauty and the Beast Wildflowers and Climate Change. That's the project in the book is Impressions of Spring, a voice for wildflowers of the West Republic lands. So when we're not photographing flowers, we've been out photographing birds. Which I call flying flowers. This is the Merced National Wildlife Refuge. Little bit of Photoshop in there. Actually a lot of Photoshop in there. So sometimes we work on our images to make them more literal of what we saw and sometimes we play around with them and do an interpretation of it. This is the Merced National Wildlife Refuge. I photographed this in February last year. So Merced is really close. It's a beautiful refuge. There's a five mile loop you can drive around to see the birds in different types of environments. So now we'll start with the flowers at the San Francisco Bay. So we're gonna just go through these. Most of them happen in Marin and because that's our backyard and there's so many flowers there. And over time, Rob wanted to come up with different ways of photographing them. And we developed the Natural Light Studio. So photographs may look like they've been done indoors in a studio setting, but it's all been done outdoors without flash using reflectors and other, the fusion discs, different backgrounds. We have clamps, we have stakes, we have poles, we have plexiglass, we have all sorts of things. I carry 25 pounds of gear and 25 pounds of camera gear and 40 pounds of a backpack full of 40 pounds of the other stuff we were just talking about. And you can see here, we have a black background behind this photograph, but we have a white background that we started with. So often we'll try both and then later on decide which one we like better. And started creating these setup photos so we could show the environment that the flower was actually photographed in. And I decided doing that because I've seen so many other beautiful macro images that other real talented photographers had made. And I just wanted to know where did this flower live? You know, what was around it? What other plants were around it? And so it gives a sense of place for the flower. And sometimes we're really dealing with the wind and having to create wind blocks. You can see, I'm sorry, you can see that the flower is not sharp, it's out of focus, so it's still even blowing in this wind protected area that I carry around. And we're very careful about where we photograph. If it's a spot where we're gonna do damage, we won't do it. If we can be gentle and work around flowers and other plants that are alive, we will. But we have turned down situations that we would have loved to have photographed, but we don't feel we have the right to disturb them. We, I spend about an average of 45 minutes on a flower. I'm usually on my knees sometime on my stomach. And what this has given me is staring at a flower for so long, it's really given me a sense of the appreciation of the individual life form in the world. As opposed to looking at it from a species, from a general abstract perspective, looking at each flower that's an individual that I know has had a DNA and biological heritage that may go back thousands or 10 thousands of years, it gives me a much greater appreciation for the individual form of life. And that has expanded to every place I go. Now I see things as an individual in a community that supports it. So some of our favorite places in the area are Mount Tam, Ring Mountain, Point Reyes, Mount Burdell. Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The Headlands. We're really fortunate. We've got Golden Gate National Recreation Area within 12 minute walk up from our house. And so GGNRA protects so much land. There's such a great variety of species. We're just blessed with so much public land in the Bay Area. When you go to the exhibit, there's a really interesting fact sheet wall text that gives you some of the statistics of what California holds, how big the state is, how many acres are public land. There's an amazing amount of public land. I wanted to tell a funny story about this photo. We found it the night before. I found it the night before. It was getting too late to photograph. Sometimes flowers will close up and so we can't photograph them until the next day. I unfortunately had to go to traffic school the next day. So Rob came out here by himself to photograph this checker bloom and did it on his own and packed up and two seconds later it poured. So the timing was just perfect. And so by using natural light we get to play with it and we get to get a variety of different effects. This one is we're allowing the sun to reach the flower and then in this case we put a diffusion disc over it and soften the light. Yeah, we didn't spot that, sorry. We get dust on the background so that's one of the things we need to clean up. And then trying to take similar species and come up with different approaches. This is a wild rose that's out at Point Reyes. This is another flower by the shore. And one of the ones that's really fun is to find the bush poppy, which I didn't even realize there were that many different types of poppies. And this is a really neat and fairly rare one to find which is the Luicia and that was up on Mount Burdell. It's also known as Bitterroot. And you'll see the setup photo for this one out in the exhibit. And it's just amazing how hardy a plant can be. It can grow out of anything. It's a seed monkey flower and serpentine rock. Sorry, this is not always responding to me. Point Reyes. This is the San Mateo Coast, Anu Nuevo area. And along the California coast, there are all these benchlands, all these flat areas that are up above the water. Most of them have been turned into agriculture. So there are a few places where the ecosystem has been preserved. We were reading the sign as we entered this area and it said this type of ecosystem is the eighth rarest in the United States because all of these benchlands have been converted to agriculture like Brussels sprouts or cauliflower, artichokes or things like that. So I started taking to wrapping some of my flowers with a fabric because some of the flowers had a lot of the flowers have a real distracting background and I couldn't put something necessarily right behind them. Or just a boring piece of black fabric sometimes. So I started wrapping them and it'll take more time to wrap the flower than to make the composition because I wanna get the folds just right and sometimes I'll have it just right and a small puff of wind will come and blow the fabric away. It's a really, really light fabric called, it's a chiffon I've gone through five different fabric types to get something that holds the most graceful folds. And you'll see the setup photo for this also in the exhibit. So it's all about trying to present this beautiful individual, this beautiful flower in the most elegant way sometime or trying to show it in a different way that I haven't seen before. As far as I know, I'm the only one that uses this technique to do this. It's really painstaking and time consuming and can be really frustrating. And then I also developed a way to get the flower in contact with the front of the lens. So I have this, it's called the contact series. I got kinda tired of doing these strict looking botanical everything's sharp, everything's clear. But botanical images. So I've been working with this. This takes a lot of trial and error to get something that actually works. I throw a lot of them away. So this is this series. I'm looking up into the flower and the light is being transmitted through the back of it to give all these beautiful effects. If you saw this in nature, you would recognize this at all. So this is the photo that became a wall in the hospital. So now we're gonna go a little bit into the Central Valley and Gorman in the Tehachapi Mountains. And I think Julie was, were they saying that 75% of this type of flowering land in the Central Valley is gone, is now agriculture or housing. And just to back up a little bit, Anita said Gorman. Gorman is a town that's the top of the pass. Coming out of Los Angeles, you go up over the Tehachapi Mountains. There's this little town called Gorman and above the town of Gorman is private land where one of the most incredible blooms in the world happens. I've been driving up and down the interstate five past that area for 50 years and I've only seen this bloom once. And so I mean, they call it a 50 year bloom and that's been my experience. So we'll show those in a moment. So this was just right off five. So there are little islands here and there that you'll find of wildflowers that still exist. The freeway pavement is probably 20 feet that way. Then there are wonderful vernal pools in the Sacramento Valley that you can only go through with tours, some of them are on Mather Air Force Base. And again, 90% of them have been plowed under and there are special ecosystems because the soil is not permeable, so the water pools and then disappears by evaporation. So as the water is evaporating, you get rings of different types of plants and different types of flowers. And you'll see one of the photos out there from this area. So there's a fair amount of research going on on the plants in the areas. And this is a very common flower found in that area, the meadow foam. So this is Garmin, as Rob was mentioning and it was a 50 year bloom. And 50 year bloom means these type of conditions come together generally only once every 50 years. And you could get on the other side of the freeway and look back across at this hillside that was 1,000 feet high, half a mile wide, was 100% flowers. And it was the most amazing wildflower bloom that we have ever seen in the 17 years of really focusing on this project. So we were there for about five days, we were there, well actually we were there for about two days. We were lucky that a storm had come and there were these nice gray clouds overhead that made some really beautiful diffuse light. I'm standing across the freeway on the west side using a telephoto lens that's magnifying the image probably about eight times. So I was able to get all these abstracts. So the freeway goes in the valley below down there. So this is the. Los Angeles, excuse me, Los Angeles is that way about an hour of Bakersfield about 20 minutes that way. And this, can you go back one? This side of the freeway closest to us is on the west side and that's public land. It's called Hungry Valley Recreation Area. The other side of the freeway is private land and it's land that we really hope will be protected at some point in the future because it's just such an amazing place. So that's, this image is taken a little bit farther north but you still have the same collection of flowers. So now we're heading out into the Mojave Desert to the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve. This is where we started the slide show. So this is on a nice bright sunny day and this is the same Poppy Reserve seen from totally different side on a beautiful cloudy day. We took this photograph after we took the photographs you just previously saw in Gorman. So now this 1990 El Nino event was an amazing event for us to photograph. We have a few images. We're anticipating that this is going to happen again with these abundant rains. This is what we saw in Death Valley. So you want to hold this for a second? I was going through a really good website that talks about where you can find wildflowers in the desert. It's called desertusa.com and here's what I picked up just a couple days ago. I know it's only January, it's early but the flowers didn't get the memo. Spring has sprung. The southern end of Death Valley National Park is going crazy with wildflowers. Not all the players have made it to the party yet but the ones that are here are just jamming. The southern part of Badwater Road is where the big show is going on. Hills are covered with desert gold, Santa Verbena, brown-eyed evening primrose, desert five-spot, notch-leaf facility. They're also coming up on the black volcanic hills last a few miles before Ashford Mill. The canyons of the southern black mountains have all of the above flowers as well as an abundance of evening primrose on the alluvial fans, desert star, golden evening primrose, broadleaf gillie, and Mojavea can be found in the washes and the brilliant purple Caltholeaf facility is coming up, is coming into its own, covering whole hillsides in some of the canyons. Although the numbers are greater down south, the variety on the alluvial fans from Artist Drive to just south of Badwater is astounding. Desert five-spot, gravel, ghost, rock, Daisy will be blooming in days and the ground is thick, and then he has in caps, thick with plants. For those of you who are worried if there will be any flowers left when you come in March, be sure that there are huge numbers of teeny, tiny seedlings popping up behind the more developed plants. This is all in an area that gets an average of 1.2 inches of rain a year. And so we would encourage you to go to Death Valley, go to Yanzibarago, go to Joshua Tree, see some of these amazing blooms that we've been able to photograph. Yeah, and the year that we were there, Death Valley had five and a half? 5.4 inches of rain and they broke their all-time annual rainfall. We don't know what's gonna happen this year. Right. So these are a few more from that period and if you've ever seen a road runner in the rain, they look like a drowned rat. It's not their element. So keep going, we're 20 minutes into the show. So this was in Joshua Tree. Normally you'll see a can of Canterbury bells, you know, scattered throughout the washes in the El Nino rains of 1998. We were photographing in Joshua Tree. We came across this desert wash. This is all really coarse soil made out of grains of granite. So this is a non El Nino year right now. The next one is what we saw during the El Nino. So not only were there so many more plants, but they got bigger and bigger and bigger because it stayed cool. And then this is the lily right here and we are very careful again where we actually step, where we put things. So normally that, Mike. I'm sorry, normally the lily is probably about this high and there'll be a blossom here and a blossom there and a blossom there and a blossom there. This year the plant was putting so much energy into buds and blossoms to create more seeds, that plant didn't get very tall. So go the next one. And there's Zoro and Cosmic Bunny. And this is a night blooming flower. I'll go back one, sorry. So you can see how many buds are on the plant. So this, and it kept raining. I would love to visit this area and see what's there now. And the detura is a night blooming plant. We actually photographed it by moonlight the night before and then came back first thing in the morning before it closed up to get that because it's such an elegant and probably one of the largest flowers we photographed. Yeah, okay. The question about Photoshop. Did we Photoshop these photos? So this was the original capture. We had a big white sheet behind a big diffusion disc because we needed to block out the background. This is a good size plant. It's on Mount Timopaya State Park beneath the, I mean, just a little bit before the Butchak parking lot. And this is what it looks like afterwards. And this is getting it back to what our experience was minus the wrinkles in the sheet. Again, this is a Palmer's buckwheat. The light was very low, it was very diffuse. What the camera captures is not what the mind does. It is not what the mind sees. It doesn't capture the feelings. So our intention is always to represent the plant or the blossom as closely as we can and still give the emotional impression of what we felt when we were there, when I was down six inches from these plants, photographing it. And you can see all the sand there. It was incredibly windy as well. So you have to work on it to get what you want afterwards. What do you spend about a day on this one? Yeah. So this was what the camera captured. This is above the Kern River Gorge. There was very, very low light. There was still a bit of sunlight just hitting the trees in the background up there. But because the predominant light falling on the scene was from blue sky, it put a blue cast area on everything. So the camera captured the actual color of the light. Our eyes interpret that and make it look as real as possible. And that was what we actually saw. It's a service berry, I believe, and I think the oaks are scrub oaks. So that's some of what we do in Photoshop. People always wanna know, what have you done? What do you do? So this gives you an idea of when we go out, when we were in the deserts, on really good years we'll be out for a month, three weeks to a month at a time. So they're really long trips. And then up here in the mountains we may go out for three or four days. We're limited often when we're backpacking in because we can't carry very much food. We already have too much equipment. So my pack was 65 pounds, Rob was 85. I won't do that again. I won't either. I'm gonna hire a mule. But it was great to be up there. That's Round Top Lake, Carson Pass, Heart Lake area. So here you can drive up to 10,000 feet in park and then there's a trail, I don't have the pointer, but there's a trail that can take you up to Morgan Pass which is 11,000 feet and that's where we've gotten, that's where we got that flower. Again, the background, as you'll see was just really chaotic, craggy rock. This is Summit Passed. We went on a trip with our excellent biologist friend, Ted Kipping, who- Has arrived. Who has arrived. And Ted has led us on a lot of beautiful alpine and subalpine trips into the eastern side of the Sierra. We call Ted when we wanna know, Ted, what's this? What's this? Where's something blooming? Ted has given us so much information. He's such a good spirit. I just love him, he's such a good man. This is northern end of the Sierra, it's up in Quincy. And you'll see a lady slipper out in the exhibit in the mountain section and we actually drove three and a half hours to get that particular flower because we really wanted to include it. That was a $300 flower. And then fire, you'll see in the exhibit, we talk about fire and how important it is to clear the land for the wildflowers. So this was an area in the Santa Ana Mountains. The wildfire, fire I think was called the Baker fire, they come through the year before. And it's pretty obvious you can see on the left third, I mean the right third of the frame where the fire stopped. And this was a very, very graphic representation of how sometimes fire will touch one area and not another. So we were there following year and saw this wonderful resurgence of flowers that had just been waiting for a fire. And quite the variety. One of the problems with them waiting too long for it to burn is that it burns too hot and then the soils can actually become unfriendly to wildflowers and other plants. Almost fused. So these are some of the flowers that we found in that area. Including the flower poppy, fire poppy, excuse me. So out in the exhibit, you'll see a prototype of a book we're working on. We've been working on it for five, six years now. When we have the funding, we wanna put together, invite different authors like Mary Ellen Hannibal, who I've noticed is here and we'll speak in a little bit, to write essays about conservation and environmental issues and use our photographs. We wanted our photographs to be more than just pretty pictures. We both have been involved as activists with our art and so what could we do with the flowers? So we decided to use the flowers to attract attention and then the essays to educate and inspire people to take action to protect life on this planet. So what you'll see out there is simply a prototype, an on-demand book, and if you're interested in us staying in touch with you and giving you an update on the book when it actually comes out, we'd be happy to do that. We started this in 2009. Oh, seven years. Yeah, we put the original prototype together. Rob received an award for one of the photos from Gorman at the Wildlife Photographer Competition that's done with the BBC and the British Museum of Natural History. And we were going for him to get the award. We decided, well, we needed a portfolio. We needed something to show. So we made our first blurb book and that started the whole thing. And so we wanted to cover the West. The book is gonna be of Wildflowers of the West, mostly on public land, almost exclusively on public land. So we've been to Arizona. We've been to Colorado. So this is Needed's Hummingbird. Needed was used to photographing children and following children all around. So there's an area, the Yankee Bay Basin, which is just north of the town of Telluride in the southern, southwestern part of Colorado. It gets a lot of monsoonal rains in the summertime. Get these beautiful alpine, I mean, subalpine wildflower meadows. Then with climate change, when climate change, I mean, how climate change is gonna be affecting these areas, these meadows are moist because there's a lot of snow that takes a long time to melt. As climate change happens, these meadows will be drying out sooner. There may be less rainfall. The temperatures will be higher. So there's a concern that some of the plants from lower down, like the shrubs, will be invading these and taking over some of these meadows. So these meadows may be lost. We also went to Oregon, spent nine days at the Columbia River Gorge, which is a really fascinating place because as you go from west to east, it changes from really wet to desert. One of our favorite places is Mount Rainier, which has an amazing wildflower bloom. And you can drive up to, I think it's 5,500 feet and what you get at that elevation is more like what we get at about 9,000 feet down here. And Utah, now Rainier is one of the best of times. Utah was one of the worst of times. There were bugs and they followed us everywhere. After photographing in Capitol Reef for three days, every day we were out with the bugs, we finally had to find something to put over our face. I'm wearing Nita's underwear. It's clean. And it just washed. That I can put around my head. They were going in our ears. To keep the bugs from off of me. We're in the middle of nowhere here. Yeah, we drove up to the spot. This was just about 20 feet off the road. No cars, nothing. Within 20 seconds, the bugs were on top of us when there was nothing there. Yeah, this was really painful. There are 50 bites on each arm. And they're worse than mosquito bites. They last longer. Oh, I couldn't sleep. I mean, I didn't know. So anyway, next time, and I'm not kidding, I'm gonna bring a hazmat suit because it's white. I mean, we're photographing in the heat. So I'm gonna bring a hazmat suit and a mask. Because that's gonna be the only way I'm gonna be able to beat these bugs. So we're gonna end the show with a little bit of a journey through California's Lily family. And there's quite the variety, both onions and lilies. There's a lot of ways to photograph a flower. Sometimes we're looking straight down on it. Sometimes we're looking at it with all sorts of different light we can use. It gets really confusing sometimes. Sometimes it'll be, okay, I've got it. And then Nita will say, well, why don't you try this angle? Oh no, I don't wanna, I wanna get up my back hood. Don't just try it. Okay, so I'll do it and she's got a better angle. You know, after I've spent 20 minutes with the perfect composition. Nita has incredible eyes for finding things. She has a super saturated sense for color. I will walk by something that's small and she'll say, oh, did you see that? She's always finding things. I mean, she's pointing out things and she'll point out and say, wow, look at that over there. And I'll say, what? And I think I've got great vision, I'm a photographer. So I'm grateful for all the plants she finds that I can spend hours on my knees photographing. That's at the bottom of steep ravine trail. So sometimes we do black backgrounds and then change composition. Sometimes we do white backgrounds. So a lot of these I would have loved to have put in the show. We were supposed to do a 40 image show and I just kept adding more and more and more and more and Nita said, we're not gonna get it done. So I'm just really grateful that she let me put as much stuff in as I wanted to. So we now have 99 images in the show. At last count. 100 if you include the one in the case. So we really wanna thank the people who've made this exhibit possible. And also some of these people are here today. So we're gonna have a chance for some other people to come up and speak briefly and then we'll do a Q and A. I wanted to thank two people that are absent, Bill and Danielle. Our friends, we met up on Mount Tam who spent two days framing for us. I wanna thank Gail who's here that helped us frame. I wanna thank Sue Mazer who told us about the birds and who's taken us up to Mount Tam to show us the rare and endangered Tiberon Mariposa Lily. We are indebted to so many. We're just photographers. We're not botanists. We depend on so many people to show us where to go, what to photograph, the time of year to do it, information about what the actual Latin name is. We couldn't do this without the community of help we have. It really is a community. It really is a family that's given us the opportunity to show you all this beauty that we love so very much. So thank you for watching our slide show. Thank you for coming through all the challenges you had to. It's really nice to see so many people here. Like I said, I was here at two o'clock and there were literally two people here. And well, I'll give a slide show anyway. And I also wanna mention that we are a sponsored project of Blue Earth Alliance, an organization that was created to support documentary projects, whether it be environmental, social justice, or threatened cultures. So we're indebted to them for their support, for the tax deduction, as well as the community that they have created. So I'd like to invite... First of all, are you in a chair? Thank you, that felt so nice. Thank you.