By Mike Tedesco, Pro Photo Community

It seems logical that the best nature photographers are avid outdoor enthusiasts. That certainly is true of Art Wolfe, who early in his life developed a passion for experiencing the beauty of nature. Wolfe recalls a junior high YMCA canoe trip on the Bowron Lakes, in Canada: "We happened upon a moose eating some vegetation and I had a plastic Brownie Fiesta camera. As we got closer and closer to the moose, we'd freeze whenever he raised his head. It was such a rush to photograph a wild animal like that!"

While enrolled at the University of Washington, Wolfe became a Fine Arts major focusing on painting. "I was so excited the day I declared my major," he recalled. "Painting and fine arts really drove me." As an elective, however, he took a class in mountain-climbing. With a Konica camera in hand, climbing in the Olympic and Cascade ranges, he began to photograph more frequently and began applying his knowledge of art to the photographic image at hand.

Wolfe began working at some outdoor recreation stores in the Seattle area, and his photos from the mountain hikes immediately caught on as he began to sell the prints out of those stores. Not immediately recognizing that he might earn a decent living from his photography, Wolfe briefly worked as a substitute art teacher out of college. Fortunately, the connections he made at National Geographic and Audubon magazines proved invaluable, and the rest is history.

While working directly with a number of magazines, Wolfe began to opt for more control over his images and business, which resulted in selling his images in a variety of formats. "I try to be an octopus," he says, "branching arms out into a number of different areas where my images will sell [books, stock photography, prints, DVDs] which results in a more consistent source of revenue."

Ten years into his chosen career, Wolfe had met a number of people who had a fair amount of success in stock photography, so he leveraged contacts with agencies to begin submitting his work for sale. "I realized I had all these third and fourth choice images from my book-shooting trips in my files. I figured I might as well put them out there to see what would happen. "It didn't take long for Wolfe's stock business to surpass his book revenues. Says Wolfe, "My style has always lent itself towards stock photography."

Wolfe defines his style as "simple and clean"; it has clearly served him well over the years. "I prefer to be stylistic when shooting an animal," he says. "It is almost like a shot in a studio and similar to a commercial photographer's work, with clean lines."

In early 2004, Wolfe, on a trip to Antarctica, worked with digital cameras and was immediately converted. "I became addicted to seeing the immediate results of my work," he says, "and I loved the instant gratification as well as the ability to quickly change my settings based on what I was viewing." With film, Wolfe could not confirm his results for weeks or even months. He adds, "Digital imaging has excited me into shooting even more!" Along with the work in the field, Wolfe has come to love working with his images on the PC. It has been an incredible experience for him to work with a digital capture on the computer and organize, edit, and create projects all before arriving home from a trip. In fact, moving to digital is the first piece of advice that Wolfe would give to a budding photographer.

He insists, "Those who are resisting the digital age are losing ground fast. The ability to quickly go to ISO400 and instantly capture an image is huge! With today's cameras, matrix metering and aperture priority are spot on 99 percent of the time. It was never like that with film."