Producer's Notes for Your Photos on QUEST: Laura Watt

The Flickr set submitted by photographer, sailor & environmental scientist Laura Watt for Your Photos on QUEST (YPOQ) is all about Water. She's a prolific presence on Flickr, sharing thousands of images with the site's community of photographers. But it only takes a quick stroll through her 360+ pages of photo sets to see that she has a special talent for capturing the infinite moods and textures of the water that defines the lives of everyone who lives in the Bay Area.

The mark of a good photographer is their ability not only to capture a moment in time but to first explore, discover and see the world around us. Laura Watt shares that entire process with her viewer. We follow her along the path of becoming interested in a subject then obsessively exploring its essence through the act of photographing it. The results are poetic, personal, intimate and beautiful.

Laura's professional background also adds dimension to her work. She's a teacher of Environmental Studies at Sonoma State University and her own research explores the interface between the natural world and the cultural history of a place. Specifically, she's working on a book with about what has happened to both the natural and cultural landscape of Point Reyes since the National Park Service began managing it as a park in the 1960’s and how becoming a park affected that area's cultural legacy. That book will also include her photos.

For me as TV storyteller, I think I was most excited when I discovered that along with Laura Watt's sumptuous images comes a compelling family narrative. Both parents are biologists and photographers and she and her sister spent most of their summers at a field research station in Colorado's Rocky Mountains where her Dad studies high altitude butterflies. Her parents took beautiful photographs of the family, many of which Laura scans and shares on her Flickr pages. Her personal notes and descriptions of many of her photos are especially touching, like this one that accompanied a gorgeous photo of Laura’s "grandmahelen" as a young woman.

Today in my yoga class, our wonderful teacher Peggy told us a story during a particularly intense hip stretch (probably to take our minds off it!) -- her grandmother passed away last Thursday, at the age of 105 -- and she and her sisters were able to go be with her in the hospital & say goodbye -- and her grandmother was speaking in a somewhat sing-song voice, and in the mix said that she was riding her bike to god -- they all looked at each other and asked her, what did you say? and she clarified that she was riding her bike WITH god -- a particularly wonderful image, because in all her 105 years, she'd never learned to ride a bike -- but there she was, on one now!

Despite my own religious agnosticism/disbelief, I absolutely love this idea -- the image has stuck with me all afternoon. my own grandmothers both lived long, rich lives -- grandmahelen died in 2002, a month shy of her 92nd birthday, and my paternal grandmother grammie passed last summer at the age of 94 -- and i love to think of them both riding bikes up in the sky somewhere...

We interviewed Laura on her boat, where she lives with her cats Sophie and Louise. We talked for an hour for two minutes of TV and she showed us a sample of her 15 cameras which she uses to differing effect in her photographs. It's interesting to look at her photo sets on Flickr as they are grouped by the types of cameras she uses. One can really begin to understand that each camera is like a different instrument playing the same note but sounding completely distinct and having different tones.

For a more selective sample of Laura Watt's photography, visit her shutterpixie pages.

Watch the Your Photos On Quest: Laura Watt television story online.

For those of you who are interested in entering your photos for consideration in future YPOQ episodes, sign up for our email newsletter to get an announcement for the next submission call, or head on over to our Flickr photo group for KQED QUEST.