man and tree spirit project what i just called tree spirit it was inspired by one magnificent tree a giant tree in marin county california where i now live and i wanted to make a photograph with it and i wanted to put a body in this giant tree to add scale and drama  and i love tree climbing myself so it's sort of photographing the thing that i would do and i made that photograph and people loved it and i started just making more and more of them and within six months time it became a project and then people who were in the photographs had these amazing experiences to tell about being naked in a tree a simple thing like that became this very powerful emotional experience people are naked in the photographs for several reasons one is when people are naked in the photographs they are present it's you can take me in a shirt and jeans and set up in the streets behind me and i can kind of hang out it's no big deal it's kind of a goof whatever or someone makes a michael jackson joke these days if you take off your clothes well there's lots of jokes there too but actually do the experience and when everybody around you is serious about it it makes you well the meditative word for his presence you're not thinking about yesterday or worried about tomorrow and that changes how people are in the photographs the first photographs were absolutely naked i knew that i wanted  it's just more pure i mean anyone has done any kind of photography with nudes at all there are no clothing cues it's timeless especially for my photos i want to make images that could have been made fifty years ago or seventy five years ago and you still have clues from hair cut or someone's got tattoos or doesn't have tattoos but clothing is a huge amount of who we are or who we think we are in our society take off people's clothes or better yet remove clothes from twenty or thirty people in a photograph and they're unified they're all human beings rather than oh that guy's in a parallel jeans and that guy's got a plaid shirt and that guy's where does he wear in a suit for you just go and different stories when you see clothing take it all away and everyone is unified i've been making tree photographs people naked with trees for she i guess three or four years five years i don't even know and then my girlfriend's father showed me a story about the berkeley memorial oak grove where that was in the new york times people had been living in the trees for a year to try to prevent them being cut down it was the last stand of coast live oaks in the flatlands of berkeley and the university was going to cut down the entire grove and put up a gymnasium so young people god bless them were living in the trees and it was the whole ground crew that was feeding them food and berkeley is this weird dance and they didn't just you know shoot them out of the trees like they would have in texas let's say so they wanted them down but they wouldn't forcibly remove them and it got national and then worldwide attention i found out about that went over there looking at the beautiful trees feeling like yeah i really do want to make an environmental impact as well and save trees and asked whether making  help them they said yes and it began from there so berkeley memorial of grove my photograph there called last stand was the first time i made what i would call later a political photo it wasn't just a pretty photo to celebrate how beautiful trees are and what they do for us and how fun it is to be in nature but that also that my artwork could have environmental impact and so items for me as an inspiration of you can actually have environmental impact you can save trees you can save and land a national parks with your photographs and that was my inspiration for the last stand in berkeley i have many favorite photos i don't have one favorite photo of my trees for photographs and for different reasons one favorite because it was the earliest and it was kind of the start for me of tree spirit which i wasn't calling it then is granddaughter and it's one woman in the crook ten feet off the ground of this giant live oak tree and she's just just nestled in nothing elaborate but it's just very tender and she's dwarfed by this gigantic tree you get the scale of this thing and it looks hundreds of years old which it is another favorite photograph is last stand the photograph in berkeley i spoke about earlier and that's because there are so many people in it and it was just a total gift i planned that months in advance and i didn't know what the weather would be didn't know what the light would be i mean i scouted out a couple times and i had my best guess but it could have poured rain that day and it would have been a computer photograph lots of people participated everybody was really into it it was also a political photo for a cause and then there were people living in the trees who by my invitation descended into the photographs on pointed up off the ground into the sky and these people were actually out of frame they stripped naked and came down and for them if you'll seen a set of the picture hanging from the trees one of them upside down on one leg that's how comfortable he was in the trees and it just super dramatic and the website doesn't do it justice because it's this big and it's it's a big picture with a lot of drama both top and bottom of the frame and the great  sunlight came in from behind and illuminated some of the bodies just love that picture and then a third favorite photo i would mention is called douglas firs dance and it's a color photograph a lot of my pictures are black and white most of them are black and white tend to shoot black and white because i want to unify body with tree and that for me works bunch that are black and white but this was just it's a green mountainside in marin county and the fog rolled in so it's kind of not so brightly colored and it just it's screams green is young douglas fir trees and people are instead of being kind of quiet in repose they are jumping about like banshees it totally high energy picture and i did a long exposure and zoomed a bit so it looks like a photoshop effect but it's done in camera not that it matters i love the effect and a very different energy and stamps one of the most common questions i get is how do you get people naked in your photographs how do they trust you and why would women come and why would men come and the simple answer is they look at my website tree spirit project dot com they see fifty pictures sixty pictures as body of work and they respond to them they like them and see that they're artistic they're well crafted it's not you know just nudity or sex for sex's sake or neutered sake and they say they want to be in the pictures i had one woman who saw a showing of mine and she called me up and left a message saying i want to be i've got to be in one of your photographs with my one year old and that had never happened before with someone insisting they want to be in one of the photographs with a something as vulnerable as their firstborn child and if you look at the work you see they're innocent they're sweet hartsville it's safe to be in the two general categories my work is one or two people so it's much more about those people unless i turn their head away and then they become anonymous again and then there are group photographs where if there are twenty thirty people not that everybody realizes that but if you're in a photograph with a lot of people you become anonymous just human beings you don't see yourself anymore i even have complaints of people who are more free with their bodies and being seen and they complain afterwards that they're too anonymous like where am i why did i come all this way you can't see who i am  but the usual concern of course is that people will lose their jobs or it'll be on the internet so there's a huge amount of trust involved and i really create i would say a safe if not sacred space when i make these photographs whenever possible so i found also that i can use these photographs which get attention because of the controversy around nudity to bring attention to an existing environmental cause that's what happened for me in berkeley and that's why i'm sitting here in charleston my third visit here because i learned about the angel oak tree is magnificent hundreds year old gigantic tree that stuns anybody even non tree lovers and when i made a photograph and sammy to be naked people to it it became a big deal and it made the papers t v coverage came out the day we did it the police came we were almost all arrested but we weren't because we were peaceful and we had a calm sober serious political intent which is to call attention to the tree don't cut down it's far ist it's been a magnificent gift for me that i can combine photography in a way to actually make a difference in specific  instances where trees are threatened by ill fated planning poor development i'm not anti development but it needn't be you know cutting down the lungs of the earth which is our forests my photographs are i think a hundred percent ninety nine percent natural light and while it's i mean i've been on shoots over the years as a commercial photographer and could bring lighting trucks and run long cables to generators to get them far away from the shoot for two or three good reasons i don't do that and i work with just natural light one is i want the photographs to look natural i don't want to look like big bank lights and there are skilled national geo photographers who can add lighting you're not sure how they've added the light and if i were to add light it would be done like that so it's not calling attention to the technique i usually have rushed for time either it's cold the police might be coming occasionally i can do a shoot where it's very remote and i have time and then the other issue even there is the trees are so huge it would take a huge amount of equipment other than if i just take a  light in on the subject perhaps but ultimately i just love the look of natural light i'll scout something in the morning early and late once in a while shoot mid day if i want you know dappled light or high contrast light i want to maybe hide the subject otherwise i'll try to use earlier late or i'll shoot back lighted like right now there's sun behind this tree so all exposed for just open shade and then let the rest either burn away in the background or be an edge white or backlight behind natural light is not what people think oh that's just eas don't bring anything and i just take a snapshot it's always always looking your subject matter in seeing what looks good sometimes i seen a tree and i say you know what it's just not getting lighted any time a day that works or is buried in a farce i can't shoot without doing some elaborate lighting set up but  natural eye photographer is just as skilled i like to imagine and proclaim as someone who's working with muscle strokes is just a whole different talent set it's ultimately looking your subject and seeing light james robinson taught me shoot what you love shoot what you are passionate about shoot what you will shoot because you don't give a hoot for the money that's actually how you make your money it's a paradox so i mean that is my advice man that's been my experience and i've seen it before shit with you up and all the rest  and if there are people out there with me who have a specific tree or forest that they think would benefit with the attention that a true spirit photograph can bring i'm thrilled and honored to talk with them and see what it would be a bit