Stephen Johnson Photography News

August 2025

Hello to my subscribers and guests. Thanks for visiting my August 2025 newsletter.

This month's View From Here column explores the premiere of my new On Stage exhibition (opening August 9), a new Georgia O’Keeffe movie, and the new Rubin Telescope.

The preview of my Urban Eden Golden Gate Park work remains up at least through August. Come see this first showing of my most recent project. The Gallery is open most Saturday’s 2-5pm, also when I am here working, and by appointment. Call or email to set up a time to visit 650 355-7507.

My Image Editing Two Day Intensive workshop is Sept. 6-7, 2025 and the Masterful Fine Art Digital Photography Printing Class Sept. 27-30, 2025. There are the last scheduled studio workshops before the studio closes.

— Steve

As these newsletters can cover many subjects, let me know of topics you would like to see addressed.

Scholarships

As part of my ongoing commitment to photographic education, there is one student scholarship spot in many of my classes. Please pass the word along.

For discounted time studying with me, keep in mind my Mentoring Program.

Trentepohlia on Cypress. 2025.

I’m always drawn to the strange orange growth that thrives on trees along the California Central Coast. It is Trentepohlia, an orange algae with carotine in its epidermus. This stand is frosted in the algae and keeps me exploring the possibilities.

I’m offering a 14-inch-wide print of this photograph for $195. Larger prints can be ordered. This print at this price is offered through August 31. I'll be taking orders until then, and shipping them out by September 15, 2024. The image reverts to its normal price after that, $800 for an 11x14, $1500 for a 16x20 print.

Forest. Fitzgerald Reserve. 2025

A workshop demo on black and white “seeing” led to this photograph, rendering much a of what I envisioned.

THE VIEW FROM HERE
by Stephen Johnson

Rock Stars, a Sea-Serpent and Deep Space

July has rapidly passed with archive searches and printing for my new On Stage concert performance exhibition. The show opens Saturday afternoon August 9th from 2-5pm.

I’ve also invested time in our local Pro-Democracy/Pro-Parks protests and events related to the Western Artifacts exhibition, including a new catalog from that July show.

The reveal of the new NAGA sea-serpent sculpture in Golden Gate Park brought out a nice community with whimsical wonder to a wet morning and magical evening lighting ceremonial.

A Photo


is of the heart

of the soul

Touch by light

that draw by your mind

that the years remember

with a smile

and

a story 

that can be shared…

written spontaneously for me decades ago by Street Poet Greg Neumann in Berkeley or the Haight in San Francsico

New Show

On Stage

It was a big deal for a small town boy to see many Rock and Roll legends perform, for real, right before my eyes. As it happens, I took my first photography class just six months after that March 1973 Neil Young show. I didn’t even own an adjustable camera until that fall. That summer of 1973, I fell for a girl who happened to own a nice camera and loaned it to me, which set me up nicely for a fall photo class I was planning on taking.. By the time the George Harrison tour came to the Bay Area on November 6, 1974, I had been seduced by photography. I had not only acquired my own camera, and a few lenses, but had also been developing my own film, including Ektachrome slides, having then worked for a year slide copying/developing, and as a Lab Assistant in the Photo Department of my junior college. By then I had learned about pushing film as well (under-expose the film by rating it at a higher ISO and and over-developing it to compensate), so was able to custom develop the Harrison rolls to get better/sharper exposures.

The concert photography opened up a new world of photographic possibilities, making even more real the experience of seeing these famous performers and photo-recording the experiences, even two Beatles. By then I had become the family photo archivist, gathering rolls of scattered negatives together, copying/enlarging prints for my grandmother so she could see them better, all the while trying to preserve the evidence of family history and real records of the people and some experiences. For me, photography was ever more becoming a way of holding memory, keeping precious memories alive, and connecting to the time before my parents divorced. The concert experiences and photographs operated on many levels, the famous made even more real by the photographs, making these celebrities real people, seen with my own eyes, and of course, all of the wonderful music I was hearing.

It's a bit strange, but as I’ve been going through the shows I’ve seen, it’s amazing how much has been lost in the flow of time. The shows I photographed are the best remembered. Even shows I now know I must have seen, have mostly collapsed down to the acts I photographed. I don’t like this disconnect between memory without photography, but it is true. The photographs have been a living encouragement of the memory. It’s part of what makes photography so powerful, it does act on our memory, and make those photographed events more vivid. It’s not surprising, the aid of concrete evidence has weight. But there is something larger tapped into here about the role photography plays in our lives, our hearts, and our sense of how we’ve lived. Photogaphy is a powerful truth teller and an ally in appreciating our lives. It is part of what makes the “we were there” snapshots sought after.

I have sold many prints of these photographs over the years, have even licensed a few, but have not, until now, gathered them into exhibition of work. It is good to pull these images together, and take a walk back down the wonder of my growing love of photography, the connection to these rock stars, and my own pride in my evolving craft.

There is also a curious gap in my concert photography from 1980 to 2003. Although it became harder to bring cameras into concerts during the last of this period, the only explanation I can think of is that I got very busy with building family, home, and some big projects, from the At Mono Lake show, the The Great Central Valley, to With a New Eye: the Digital National Parks Project. This gap is also where the exhibition photographs switch from film to digital. All very curious to me.

Urban Eden: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. A Preview

Through Summer 2025

Urban Eden: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park

As I build the exhibition from my Golden Gate Park Project, I am mounting a temporary preview on my Guest Wall to move the selection process forward. Join us for this peek into the larger project to come.

Urban Eden explores San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park combining Stephen Johnson’s new original photographs with his work made over the past 30 years.

San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is 1017 acres of human transformed sand dunes and rocky hills made into an expansive urban park, offering refuge to one of the great cities of the world. Urban Eden is a photographic exploration of the beauty, diversity, and sheer power of will in planning and creating spaces. Set up a time to come by and see the preview.

After Movie Thoughts About My Own Work

Considering my own art, the O’Keeffe movie made me feel like I don’t take it seriously enough. In my late sixties, I do have a growing awareness that time ahead is far from infinite, that serious choices about how I spend my time are ever more important. I have always felt a sense that there is so much to do, so much opportunity, but too many ideas I want to explore, too many places I want to see. I can’t help but conclude that projects I have started that were heart driven, now need time/attention to properly respect them. But printing old images, even when they deserve the attention, does not feel like making art, it is fulfilling earlier inspirations. It is work, often breeding new discoveries, but clearly work. My photo backlog is enormous, but the world in front of me right now is huge. It is a difficult balance to strike,

I remember my friend author Gerry Haslam (The Great Central Valley: California’s Heartland) talking about writing every morning, often during the very early hours. I don’t treat my photography that way. But I could. I could even write everyday. The notion of moving forward every day with rendering thought, heart, and inspiration, seems to be of deep value. Even if not everyday, most days. I need that for meaning in my life. I’m not living it right now.

The New Vera Rubin Observatory

The new Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile has been constructed with the largest digital camera ever made, an amazing 3200 megapixel sensor array designed to quickly capture pieces of the sky with extraordinary resolution. The first of these photographs and movies were released in June.

Camera: About the size of an SUV and weighing in around 2800 kg (6000 lbs), the LSST Camera is the largest camera ever built. It has a huge 3200-megapixel CCD array that will capture our largest, most-detailed view of the cosmos yet.

Thoughts on the Vera Rubin Telescope

From Chile this week, the first images from the Vera Rubin telescope were made public. More than 10 years in the making, this 3200 megapixel camera behind an enormous, precise telescope is commencing a study of the sky with unprecedented detail, speed and repeatability. Each image is so large that we struggle to even figure out how to look at it. So we look at it in pieces, and sample dramatically, lower resolution images out of the larger files, just so that our technology can display them to us. Viewing becomes a matter of zooming in on a particular area of interest to see the detail unfold as the view gets closer, and closer, and closer. The first images were reported to have revealed 10 million galaxies. Many of these galaxies were never seen before this week. It is conjectured that 40 billion objects could be resolved, or more.

Our cosmos is laced with incredible complexity, amid an unimaginable vastness. This new telescope, and these amazing images elicit an emotional response to my heart/eyes, and the cosmos itself, that my heart has both struggled with and been delighted by. It is that sense that there is so much more out there, than we can see, even as we stare at wonder almost beyond belief. We can take in that wonder as photographers, as we try to record that wonder to some degree, as lovers of this Cosmos we are existing in. We can try to appreciate the vastness, but it is so far beyond our human comprehension, that all we can do is continue to struggle to find metaphors to describe the immensity. We get quaint notions of time, beginnings, endings, distance, and impose models that try to create a framework for understanding. But in reality, the nature of this existence that we are now experiencing is so far beyond anything that we can easily conceive of, or maybe even imagine. We keep modeling reality, trying to study it and understand it. This telescope is now apparently capable of producing substantially more information than the human eye can resolve, much less our screens or printers. That seems to suggest something very profound, and that we get reminded of with some degree of regularity in this age that we’re living in. There is so much to learn, so much to see, so much to experience that even a lifetime dedicated towards seeing as incisively as possible, leaves us in wonder of all that we can ascertain, all that we still don’t see, all that we still don’t know, but are completely taken in by the wonder of.

Photography gives us an insight, maybe at least a portal, into seeing and holding a sample of that wonder. I often look at my photographs that I’m proud of, and I am amazed by what they are and still feel like there is a little credit due to me for their existence. Yes, I saw the subject. I tried to craft a light based impression of it, but in the end, I had nothing to do with creating it. All in fact I’m doing is trying to witness , to select, to notice, to share. And that has been the extraordinary privilege of my life to notice struggle to understand, and to share.

6/26/25

Standing Up

for Our Parks, the Constitution and the Rule of Law

Gather on Saturdays at noon to lobby the passing cars on Highway One to be aware of parks funding cuts and the need to restore funds. We have many signs to share, and so many issues to address.

Come join us: Saturdays at Noon at Highway One and Mori Point Road, Pacifica, CA

Check out our events. For Protests in your area check out Indivisible on Mobilze.

Here are a few of the protest posters I’ve been making. Feel free to use and distribute.

News from the Studio and Galleries

As the Studio Closes there is more stuff there than will fit into the space I have at home. Among the item looking for new homes:

Studio Assets that Cannot Come Home

• 27 foot long Panoramic print of Stonehenge

• Iris Realist Printer vintage 1997

• Vintage Agfa Horizon Film/print scanner

• HP Color Designjet 3100Z 44 inch printer

Shows Available for loan or Tour

• Life Form

• Exquisite Earth

• With a New Eye: the Digital National Parks Project

• 50 Years of Space Photography

Recent Prints in the Gallery

There are always new prints available to see in the gallery, from the Hale Telescope, to the Golden Gate Park Project, to the evolving Animal Series and new selections in the discounted print bins.

Current Exhibitions

The current exhibitions in the gallery include my new On Stage exhibition, and the Golden Gate Park project preview. Continuing in the main gallery is my Life Form exhibition.

Visiting the Gallery

My galleries and studio are generally open by appointment, but I am often there 10am–5pm on weekdays. Write to inquire or call 650 355-7507 to schedule an appointment.

I hope you can come by the gallery and see the original prints in the Life Form Gallery and its Life Form Portfolio. I invite you to join me on a workshop, rent lab space, or just say hello and let me know what you are up to photographically and what you might like to see me offer. I value your input.

Virtual Educational Experiences

Virtual Classes and Lectures, online live classes on various topics with limited space and Q&A sessions, are now a regular part of my workshop program. Critiques are now virtual.

Virtual Classes

My virtual classes program, launched in 2020, has allowed me to reach students around the world. I remain committed to offering great courses whether in person or virtually. See what satisfying experiences students have had on my workshops by exploring Workshop Testimonials. 

Virtual Mentoring

Set up time for me to help with your photographic work, remote or in-person. Mentoring Program.

Virtual Consulting

With all of our busy schedules and limited budgets, destination workshops or classes become a challenge, but many of you still have questions you need answered, or feedback on some new work. I want to remind you of my Virtual Online Consulting Program. This service allows all of you out there around the globe to consult online, live, on technical, aesthetic and workflow issues.

Virtual Mentoring/Consulting

Existing Online Tutorials

My Essays and Tutorials from the past couple of years can now be found on my Newsletter Archive.

Photo Chats

I’ve been doing weekly virtual Photo Chats with groups of photo friends to keep everyone encouraged to keep working, creating a forum to share and problem-solve. I’ve now built a webpage on the chats. Let me know if you would like to join us.

Most every Tuesday morning since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, I have been doing weekly virtual Photo Chats on Zoom with groups of photo friends. They are casual, virtual get-togethers, and have created a little community with regular sharing, guest presentations, demos, and photo feedback. Let me know if you would like to join us.

Many of my mentoring students have wanted help with their printing, often to make sure they can produce a specific print. Consequently, my Print Mentoring Program sets up a 2-hour time slot and the production of a finished print, all with the tutorial video of how we produced the print together. Prints can be up to 16x20 and on either Hahnemühle Museum Etching or Photo Rag Pearl paper. Fee is $500. Email for more information and to set up times. 

Recent Print On Demand Book Projects

Click on the book covers above to learn more and purchase.

I finished three new books in 2023. Water: A Photographic Portrait launched the winter, and the new Cliffside Peregrines and Fauna books were finished at the end of the year.

I sold out of the first run of the Fauna book and have reordered all three of the new books for the studio stock.

The links here go to my printer Magcloud, where you can order them directly.