Upshot — Pro photographers are rarely given a second chance to fail. With the privilege of continuing to get freelance photo assignments from one of the nation’s foremost news magazines comes the responsibility to deliver a strong photograph every time. For me, it was often a portrait. Sometimes an idea that makes…

Art Form, Not Format —

with Stephen Stills — The tortuous path to this portrait of Stephen Stills high up in the Colorado Rockies initially led downhill a year earlier and a thousand miles away. Lookout Mountain Avenue — not really an avenue per se — is a steep and narrow lane that snakes up and down the west…

Dancers of the San Francisco Ballet — I am lucky to live in a city filled with world-class music and dance, including its namesake San Francisco Ballet. …

The Art of the Chopper — Praise the Lowered! Imagine motorcycles unlike any others you’ve seen before, ornate mechanical confections like Fabergé eggs with engines, exquisite but hard-boiled — and big, resplendent in the variety of their design and spectacular enough to be arrayed on pedestals in a museum. In fact, they were.

Riding with Sir George Martin — It was a veddy, veddy English cah. Even a modern Morgan — they still make them — looks like it just burbled out of a garage in a state of perfect preservation, under wraps since 1936, with its stretched hood and engine-flanking louvers, swooping external fenders, a ragtop open cockpit…

A Work of Portraiture in Progress — “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.” Mike Tyson The blood-stained canvas holds a manifest allure for those who step through the ropes and expose themselves to the unrelenting force of an opponent who seeks transcendence in the chaos of combat. It’s not about self-defense. Nor…

After a hard-fought campaign, President-elect Ronald Reagan was unwinding at Rancho del Cielo, his retreat nestled close to the sky in the Santa Ynez Mountains, north of Santa Barbara. My friend Mike Evans, who covered both of Reagan’s presidential campaigns for Time, was unwinding, too, as my houseguest in LA…

A Photographer’s Race to Scoop Mount St. Helens — In the spring of 1980, scientists at the United States Geological Survey began to voice their concerns publicly about a long dormant volcano northeast of Portland and southeast of Seattle called Mount St. Helens. Considered a gem in the Cascade Range, a glacier-crowned peak rising majestically from the Gifford Pinchot…