Wildlife In Black & White

I remember the fixer smell I couldn’t get off my hands, seeing my image emerge on paper for the first time as it sat in the developer. I was the darkroom manager at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where I was studying to be an electrical engineer—and slowly falling more and more in love with photography.

I remember spending hours manually dodging and burning my prints with tools made from cardboard, coat hangers and strings. I learned and drew my inspiration from masters like Ansel Adams and Jerry Uelsmann. These artists had ways of leading your eyes through the frame by darkening certain areas and lightening others. They could take you on a journey, leading you down into a scene as if you were walking the path yourself or taking you into their endless artistic imagination.

Their photographs, as well as the work of other black-and-white masters like