Capturing the Moment

William Ervin has devoted the past two decades to driving and hiking his way through some of America’s most beautiful and haunting landscapes. The vistas and the sights he witnesses always amaze him. They are always changing. The time of day, the angle of the sun, the weather, both good and bad, the shifting seasons continually make a difference.

Ervin points out, “I want to capture the feeling of seeing, to share the excitement of being there in all of that beauty, to preserve the magic of a fine moment. Sometimes, I come close.”

He began his career photographing birds and other wildlife, but his interests quickly broadened to include all kinds of natural subjects, especially landscapes.

They mesmerize him.

Often, they haunt him.

While continuing to use 35mm equipment for wildlife, he now shoots landscapes with a custom built, panoramic view camera, which, he says, is perfect for capturing the grandeur of his Colorado homeland and the American West.

The camera is big. It is heavy. Ervin customized it himself, adapting the film back from an old-fashioned V-Pan camera and placing it on a regular 5 X 7 view camera. It gives him frames that are two-inches high and seven-inches wide. He only gets four shots per roll of film. As he explains, “The camera is something special.”

He hauls it up the sides of mountains, carrying it into glacial meadows more than ten thousand feet high, where the air is very thin, and moves into country that few, if any, have ever seen.

Even if the area is heavily photographed, he always finds something different and unusual and unforgettable, even using a High Dynamic Range technique to ferret out color and detail from dark and shadowed objects.

His camera catches magic.

Ervin says, “There is beauty and mystery in the natural world – the play of light on landscapes, the way weather paints the sky, colors conjured up by the shape-shifting seasons. Birds and wildlife bring this world alive, and I am dazzled by their power, charmed by their behavior. Nature is so vast that my cameras, even the big ones, seem small.”

His training as a field biologist has given him a special insight into animal behavior and ecology, while his love of light, color, weather, and the seasons inspires his landscape work.

An artistic eye and decades of experience in photography enable him to capture fleeting moments in the wild and present them as images of strong visual appeal. His work has been exhibited widely in the United Sates, and has been published both nationally and abroad.

Credits include The National Geographic Society, Audubon Magazine, Natural History, International and National Wildlife, Geo, BBC Wildlife, Terre Sauvage, and the Sierra Club.

His prints are currently on display in many Colorado galleries, including the Boulder Arts & Crafts Cooperative, where he has been a member since 1983.