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.