Eulogy for an Icon

Posted on May 29, 2023

Gary Hart Photography: Solitary Tree, McGee Creek, Eastern Sierra

Solitary Tree, McGee Creek, Eastern Sierra
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II
Canon 70 – 200 f/4 L
1/40 second
F/7.1
ISO 400

This week I’m mourning the demise of “Outdoor Photographer” magazine. While the patient may still have a faint pulse (the website remains up, and I’ve seen no official announcement), it appears to be on life support, with no sign of brain activity, just waiting for the plug to be pulled: The OP staff has been let go, there has been no social media activity in a week, and visitors to the website are greeted with a solicitation to purchase the assets of the magazine and its sister photo publications. (Tip: Don’t.)

Starting as a fairly niche publication in 1985, OP built slowly through the end of the 20th century, then rode the digital wave that began swelling in the early 2000s—until it smashed into the rocks of digital content in the 2010s.

For the boomers who cut their teeth photographing nature with film and transparencies (slides), only to closet their cameras in favor of family and work priorities, digital photography caught fire at exactly the right time: just as nests emptied and careers had either run their course or at least stabilized enough to permit outside distractions. This confluence made digital photography the catalyst for a wave of maturing boomers with time on their hands and a longing for the great outdoors. Conveniently, “Outdoor Photographer” magazine, the best of many landscape/nature photo magazine offerings at the time, became the rejuvenated boomers’ goto photography info source.

While I’d never completely mothballed my beloved Olympus OM-2, the transition to digital did breathe new life into my own photography as well. So not long after replacing my Olympus SLR film system with a Canon 10D DSLR and an assortment of compatible lenses, I re-subscribed to OP.

Each month I devoured OP’s articles, columns, reviews, and even ads to get up to speed on the new world of digital landscape photography. My photography forays into Nature increased, and I soon started considering leaving my life in technical communications (tech writing, training, and support) to pursue landscape photography.

Keeping my day job at first, I focused on galleries and weekend art shows with enough success to consider the next step—an actual career change. Based partially on info gleaned from OP, I honed in on photo workshops as the best path to fulltime income with my camera, and Yosemite seemed the best place to start (intimate familiarity and relatively near home). Soon I had a workshop format in mind and a couple of workshops scheduled.

As I tried to identify the best path to filling these nascent workshops, I recognized that OP’s subscribers were a perfect match for my workshop demographic. And even though I couldn’t afford to advertise, I couldn’t afford not to advertise even more, so in 2006 I closed my eyes and jumped with both feet. I can now say absolutely that without those monthly ads in the (still small) Workshops and Classes section at the back of OP, I’d have been back in the 9-5 tech world grind in less than a year.

Within a couple of years I was submitting articles to OP—difficult to be noticed at first, but once the first one was published, subsequent articles came fairly regularly. My first “Outdoor Photographer” cover came in 2015, and while it wasn’t my first ever cover image, it was the cover I was most proud of. Three more OP covers followed.

My Outdoor Photographer Covers

OP November 2015 Cover

OP March 2019 Cover

OP April 2021 Cover

OP March 2023 Cover

Once it started, OP’s decline was steep and relentless. I can’t say that I’m surprised, or even particularly saddened by the loss of this version of a magazine that had shrunk to a shell of its former self. Frustrated by dwindling content and (what I perceived as) lower quality paper stock and image resolution, I actually cancelled my subscription at least 5 years ago, and stopped advertising my workshops on OP at the start of last year (with no noticeable decline in interest in my workshops). But either by circulation error or simply to keep their circulation numbers up, OP still kept sending me an issue each month, so I’ve been able to monitor the magazine’s downfall.

Nevertheless, though I continued providing content, in recent years payment came slower and slower. At one point I actually refused to pay for my advertising until I received a many-month overdue payment for an article (that got their attention). I’m still waiting to be paid for my March cover and article, but am not holding my breath (despite a recent promise that it would only be late, and perhaps come in increments).

I’m not even sure how much we should blame OP’s original management for the magazine’s shrinking content and diminished printing quality—faced with an exodus of readers to digital content, and an aging demographic exacerbated by younger audiences more drawn to mobile phone snaps and video, I imagine each decision to deliver less was motivated by the imperative to cut costs enough to stay above water for one more issue. Maybe different decisions would have saved it, or at least slowed the decline, but I suspect these changes would ultimately prove to be insurmountable.

Given the amount of online resources available, it’s likely that most OP readers will have no problem replacing the information they were getting from OP. Unfortunately, Internet information is not always reliable (perhaps you noticed?). While there’s lots of great stuff out there, there’s also a lot of (mostly well-intentioned) garbage that ranges from fairly harmless to just plain wrong. (At least with a magazine as credible and respected as “Outdoor Photographer,” you could read it fairly confident that the info is reliable.)

If you’ll permit a shameless plug, let me suggest myself as an alternate source of reliable landscape photography insight. Posting weekly blogs here for more than 12 years (!), I’ve created (many) hundreds of articles designed to aid photographers and Nature enthusiasts, ranging from stories of image captures, photography how-to, and the natural science underlying my subjects. And the vast majority of images I share are paired with a blog post describing their capture, as well as a few thoughts they inspire. Because I don’t allow advertising on my blog, I don’t make a penny from all this content—my goal is simply to raise my own exposure by providing value to other photographers. So if you like what you read, please return often, and tell your friends.

About this image

I fired up the Wayback Machine for this image that dates all the way back to my early digital days and OP’s heyday. This was before I left my job at Intel, but after I’d made the wholehearted plunge into digital that would lead me to now. Having recently acquired the new Canon 1DS Mark II (an “impossible” 16 megapixels!), an absolute brick of a camera that was state-of-the-art at the time (with a price-tag to prove it), I was quite anxious to start getting a little return on my investment. But since I had a regular job that expected me to show up and produce, roadtrips back then weren’t quite as easy as they are today. But my brother Jay and I managed to set aside enough time to travel over to the Eastern Sierra for a fall color weekend.

This tree is on the unpaved road to McGee Creek, a favorite hiking and fall color spot between Bishop and Lee Vining. It had been on my radar for several years, but I’d never found the conditions suitable to photograph it. But following an afternoon fall color shoot at the creek, the late sunlight lit these tilde-shaped clouds and I could see that conditions were right for even more color as the sun dropped. Jay and I had been photographing a little down the road—I knew exactly where I wanted to be, but wasn’t sure we had time to get there. We quickly loaded into my truck and bounced over rocks and ruts for about a mile, pulling up to the spot with just seconds to spare.

Bolting from my truck, I raced to a spot that enabled me to juxtapose the tree with the just peaking sunset pink, setting up with barely enough time to fire off a small handful of frames before the color faded.