For this interview project I decided to interview two photojournalists, one, Richard Barnes, a freelance photographer, the other, Melissa Farlow, a photographer for National Geographic.

In the first interview I discussed my interest in the field with Melissa Farlow who is an accomplished photographer for National Geographic who has numerous albums and photographs in the magazine. It was very exciting to get a response from someone so prominent in a field that I am interested in pursuing.

Q#1: One of my favorite projects that you have published, is the American West project focusing on horses. It seems in the pictures I have viewed, like “Mustangs Run on BLM Desert In Nevada,” where the angle seems dangerously close and “Wild Horse Mustangs Battle,” the timing and lighting is perfect. How are you able to capture these moments, do you have a camera set up and continuously recording, or do you sit for hours waiting for the perfect shot, what is your secret?

A#1:  The camera was in a protective box with a plastic dome over the front of the lens. I attached a pocket wizard to the camera so I could fire the camera remotely. So I sat on a hillside and watched as horses ran over the camera and pressed the button to time it. I did this for three days with three cameras set up—waiting all day in the hot sun for horses to be driven into a corral. They were being chased by helicopters who were rounding up the horses.  After every run, I climbed down the hill where I was hiding and cleaned off the lens and set it up again to point in the right direction and covered it with Sage brush branches. The difference was that I had ONE time that the horses ran by and it was triggered with a remote cord attached to the camera that was set up under the rail of the race track. These are just tricks for getting a camera where a person cannot be. I also photographed all of theses situations with a long lens.

I normally work in a very straightforward manner just walking around and looking for light and moments trying to compose a photograph. Photographing horses was much like photographing people, I had to watch and anticipate what was going to happen. Patience and timing are important for me.

Q#2: What is your favorite project?

A#2: I am working on a book about wild horses right now that is called Wild at Heart…Mustangs and the young people who are working to save them…with Terri Farley. It is a young adult book that will be out later this year—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is the publisher. I am shooting the last pictures on deadline…and I am trying to put a book trailer together which is like a movie trailer so people will know what the book is about and want to buy it.

For my second interview I discussed my interest in the field with Richard Barnes who is a famous photographer for different venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and many more.

Q#1: You seem to have a variety of different projects and exhibits, ranging from “Animal Logic,” to “Refuge.” What is your source of inspiration for the different ideas for your projects?

A#1: Yes, the inspiration for my projects comes from many sources but the two you site above are the from the same body of work called “Animal Logic” which is also the title of my book. I became interested in museums and how collections were formed while working as the excavation photographer for the joint Yale/University of Pennsylvania expeditions in a place called Abydos, Egypt. I had been working as the excavation photographer for a few dig seasons when I found myself becoming more and more interested in where the objects we were extracting from the ground where destined for; usually the museum or other collecting institution. I eventually concentrated my efforts on the natural history museum and the ways in which we collect, curate and display objects and animals culled from nature.

Q#2:  Also, in a few of your projects, you seem to take multiple black and white shots. For example in “Unabomber,” and “Still Rooms,” is there a meaning behind choosing the black and white style? Just appealing to the eye or is it an in the moment type of thing?

A#2: I use color or black and white as the subject dictates whether I choose one over the other. There have been times when both color and black and white seemed appropriate for a given subject such as in “Refuge” where I photographed the bird nests both ways. For the exhibition I made a grid of smaller b/w images and printed the color images quite large, (30×40), as stand alone pieces to accompany the b/w grid. For my Murmur series I decided against color straight off as I associated the starlings in the skies over Rome to drawings in black and white. In this case it worked very well as the photographs hover somewhere between photography and something made with a brush or pen and ink. I like this ambiguity contained in the work, as it hovers somewhere between a drawing and a photograph. These images would have been much more “documentary” in color and therefore not nearly as provocative or open ended in their interpretation.