Greetings!

We are enjoying a quiet summer as we watch the monsoon rains turn the Sonoita hillsides a bright green worthy of Ireland. Each of us is taking advantage of the slowed pace of travel and exhibit preparation to experiment with new directions. We hope to share some of the fruits of our efforts over the next few months. Here's a brief summary of the past month's activity.

For those of you we know personally, Karen's recovery is proceeding well and we look forward to our first post-surgery back-country trip (to the South Coyote Buttes and the Grand Staircase of the Escalante) in late September.

The show at the Open Shutter Gallery in Durango, CO continued through August 5. The opening was quite well attended by a large gathering of photographically literate folks, which made for an extraordinarily stimulating evening. We managed as well to do some photographing around Tuba City, AZ, with special emphasis on Coal Mine Mesa and Canyon. We were blessed with cool (for early July), crystal clear weather.

Steve's image, Cottonwoods, Fall, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, is included in the summer show, A Grand View: Arizona Landscape Photography, 1871 - 2010, at the Etherton Gallery in Tucson.

Steve has a portfolio of his Earth Forms images included in the current issue of Lenswork Extended, a DVD version of the bi-monthly photography magazine. The portfolio of 50 images is complemented by a long interview with the magazine's editor, Brooks Jensen.

Steve will serve as the juror for the upcoming show, Abstraction in Photography to be held at PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont. For those photographers on our list, a call for submissions is open; the deadline is August 16.

One of Karen's images is included in the Online Gallery Annex of the exhibit, Photos with Words, at the website for the PhotoPlace Gallery. This show opens on July 20 and runs through August 7. A catalog of this exhibit is now available as a Blurb book, as are previous exhibits at the gallery.