Just finished launching Luceo’s brand new website and, before I get too off-track, I want to share the important links:

1. The Site:  http://luceoimages.com

2. The Blogs: http://luceoimages.com/blog

3. My Blog Filter: http://luceoimages.com/blog/matt-slaby

4. A Virtual Tour of the New Site: http://luceoimages.com/2009/11/welcome-to-our-new-site

The site was announced as live at noon EST, though we took the liberty to have a private launch at 11:11 on 11/11.  You know, for good luck.  Our revamped destination features a dynamic new group blog with individual filters for each photographer.  The moral of the story is that if you like what you see here, you’ll really love the stuff on the group blog.  This blog will continue to exist, though no further posts will be added.  From here on out my updates will be on the new site.  Hope you’ll join our conversation.

-MS

Audubon Magazine, the Society’s bi-monthly publication, recently ran photographs from an assignment I shot for them in early September.  The project focused on the Haverfield family and their struggles with the county in which their cattle ranch sits.  The family has been embroiled in a long-running war over the presence of prairie dogs on their ranch. They are part of growing group of cattle ranchers that are pro-prairie dog.  They believe that prairie dogs contribute to increased biodiversity on their property, enabling them to graze their cattle in a fashion that mimics the movement and grazing patterns of pre-settlement buffalo.  Healthier grazing plots mean increased productivity.  But that, according to the Haverfields, requires the help of prairie dogs.

Needless to say, they are not exactly the most popular people in old school western Kansas.  The county, particularly county commissioner Carl Ulrich, contends that prairie dogs are a nuisance and should be eradicated. Many of the Haverfields’ neighbors feel the same way. In recent years, the county has exterminated prairie dogs from the Haverfield property using a number of methods, including gas and poison, before sending them the bill. The Haverfields have discovered a number of ’secondary kill’ animals, carcasses of birds and mammals that have eaten the poisoned prairie dogs and subsequently been killed themselves. Complicating matters, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has recently re-introduced endangered black footed ferrets onto the land, a natural predator of the prairie dogs. This move has heightened tensions between neighbors and led to a series of legal maneuvers on both sides to control the spread of the prairie dogs as well as the ferrets.

Ted Williams, Audubon Magazine’s writer for the piece, explains the situation in detail on the magazine’s site.  Particularly troubling is the county’s choice to use the highly controversial poison, Rozol, in their pursuit of a scorched-earth approach to prairie dogs.  The article is available here.  Get a cup of coffee for this one.  It’s worth the read.

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It’s six hours from Denver to the Comanche National Grasslands.  Eight or ten or something like that if you drive without purpose.  I stopped counting at dark.  Denver to Trinidad, Trinidad east on dirt county roads for another 100 miles.  Doesn’t seem like much from eye level, but if you take it slow, the flat Colorado plains share smaller secrets, a hidden landscape in negative relief, canyons that slice the land in such a way that they’re almost imperceptible until you’re balanced right at the edge.  It’s the third deer hunt I’ve photographed in the last 12 months, the second one with friends of mine who make this trip every year.  A little bit about the deer, a little more about getting out and slowing down for a week.  Life always waits just up the highway, no need to rush it along.  It’s always there when you get back.

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It’s been a few years since I photographed Bobby Tan removing glass from his eyebrow with butter knives.  A little time has come and gone, but the same enthusiasm and intensity that motivated the butter knife incident are still definitely intact.  Went over to his place a couple weeks ago to look through some of his art, mostly drawings and collage-mash books, all projects that have been consuming hours of his time each day.  He’s got a little corner set up in his house, a set of pens, and has been churning out work for several months now.  It’s quite a stack of stuff that really speaks to the time and energy he’s putting into it.  Pretty impressed by his trajectory and definitely a fan of the work.  Stepped out for a few minutes to catch his opening tonight at Double Daughters in downtown Denver.  Figured I’d post this for today and put the hunt images off until tomorrow.

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Got home from photographing a deer hunt yesterday afternoon, caught the second game of the World Series at a sushi place and then detoured to Glob for a benefit Halloween show.  Strange how quick you can go from  Oklahoma border to sushi and hipster Halloween haunts, but I kinda enjoy the edges of the spectrum.  Snapped a few filler pictures at Glob, listened to a little music and called it a night.  Uneventful Halloween except for the bastard kids that cleaned out twelve pounds of candy that I left in a bucket on my front porch.  The doorbell broke a few weeks ago so I figured that the best strategy was to put the candy out.  I know that plan would have spelled sure fire failure if it was 12 pounds of chocolate, but the bag of candy that I had on hand was the cheapo bag of smarties and suckers and dried bubble gum.  You’d be hard pressed to eat 12 pounds of it in a decade.  Stealing the whole bucket, in my mind, would have been like shoplifting a tub of lard.  Far be it from me to underestimate the power of free stuff.  Cleaned out of candy in ten minutes.

Hunt pictures to follow tomorrow.

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Wrapped up my work late last night and went out to catch a haunted house party that some friends had been working on all day.  The house wound around through a maze of oddities, terminating at the back of the building in a little garage space where a few bands finished up the night.  Stuck around for Warren Bedell’s band, Spellcaster.  The damn Pharaoh hat thing made my night.

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Heading out tomorrow morning for the Comanche National Grasslands in far southeastern Colorado to photograph a deer hunt.  The camp ground itself is roughly 10 miles from the Oklahoma panhandle, 30 from northern Texas, and 20 from both Kansas and New Mexico respectively.  It’s about as close as the west gets to east coast proximity.

Cell service is sparse.  I will be checking and returning messages each morning and again in the evening.

Click below to see photographs from a hunt in southeastern Colorado last year.

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I’ve been absent from my blog for almost two weeks. Partly because I’ve been working on finishing up a hefty grant application, partly because Luceo is a matter of days from making a couple exciting announcements,  and partly because of editorial embargoes on material that’s sitting in the queue.  The latter is what’s been holding up this post.

Two months ago I travelled to Jackson, Wyoming for U.S. News & World Report to spend a day photographing Patagonia Sportswear founder Yvon Chouinard in his (unsurprisingly) modest cabin at the foot of the Tetons.  Chouinard is featured in the magazine’s Best Leaders edition (here).  I’ve been familiar his company’s unique and forward-looking business model since 2002, when my Montana-based fire crew would travel through the town of Dillon where one of the Company’s outlet stores is located.  For a bunch of people who derived their entire livelihood from being in the outdoors, the outlet came to us in the same way that a leisure suit multiplex would come to a busload of used car salesmen.  Pure gold.

The thing that has always intrigued me about the company is its ability to be congruent, to stay afloat without putting its soul up for sale.  Chouinard, a wealthy but unobtrusive man, has managed to do just that, building a network of businesses that give 1% of their annual sales to grass roots environmental organizations.  It’s a nice mixture of business savvy tethered by less flexible ideals.  U.S. News writer Kent Garber fills that idea out a bit here:

Chouinard has put environmental activism at the forefront of his company. In 1994, in fact, he threatened to walk away from Patagonia after learning that cotton from industrial farming which figured in 20 percent of the company’s sales, required all sorts of toxic chemicals and was devastating for Earth. “I said, ‘I don’t want to be in business if I have to use this product.’ ” He gave the company 18 months to switch completely to organic cotton.

Suffice it to say, I thoroughly enjoyed this assignment and left feeling like the challenges of Patagonia really aren’t that different from the challenges facing the editorial world.  You know, the problem of having high ideals, a changing marketplace, and trouble bridging that gap without sacrificing something along the way.  This, however, is a discussion for another post.

I photographed this assignment for editor and friend Avi Gupta.  It’s rare that I feel compelled to drop editor names into a blog post, but this time there’s something interesting to share related to the process.  I am a wholehearted fan and supporter of Avi’s method, which he shared with me in a conversation over the summer.  He describes editing photographs as trying to help hone the photographer’s message –not rework it.  If photographers look at each of their pictures as being words or phrases in a larger sentence, the role of the photo editor is somewhat analogous to our other half on the text side.  The print editor tunes up grammar, tightens the sentence structure, and helps develop the message of the writer. They don’t ask for the entire lexicon the writer considered using in a sentence and (ideally) they don’t undo the writer’s underlying message in favor of their own.  Avi’s process is interesting insofar as it approaches photography as a sophisticated form of communication and respects photographers for their unique perspectives.  He’s definitely not alone in that approach, but he is the first editor that I’ve heard describe the process in such a clear fashion.

Avi took a day’s portrait assignment and turned it into a little gallery that contextualizes Chouinard in a way that I’m really happy with.  You can see the magazine’s gallery online, here, or click below and see the pictures on the blog.

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