Paul Gardner

This is a little stream in Connecticut that I played in with my cousins when I was a little kid. I was looking for a good photo to take one evening and asked my uncle if he could show me where the stream was. After several days of heavy rain the stream was running at a pretty good pace and had developed some pretty serious rapids. I only had about 10 minutes or so to take these photos; after the last shot there was virtually no light left. Afterwards we went and had some excellent local made ice cream and Collin's Creamery.

These are just a few random shots from a walk in the park with my beautiful fiancee Lindsay up in Connecticut.

For the past month and a half I have been on deployment with NASA's ER2 High Altitude Research group. One of the instruments I work with at JPL is on the ER2 flying over North America doing research for several different scientists. I have been lucky enough to be able to work with such an incredible airplane. The ER2 is the same plane as the U2 Spyplane but slightly modified for earth research. On a day to day basis I get pretty unrestricted access to the airplane. The access has given me a few great opportunities to take some wonderful shots of the airplane on the tarmac and during takeoff. Currently I am wrapping up deployment at Westover Airforce Base: home of the 337 MAS C5 Galaxy group. At this particular base they maintain the country's fleet of C5 Galaxy cargo planes.

The Red Bull Air Race was one of the most spectacular sporting events I have ever been to. It was like Nascar but in airplanes over the water with crowds of people going past 100,000. Both sides of San Diego Bay were lined with spectators. Lindsay and I were able to score some Media Press Passes from a friend who works for Red Bull. The passes gave us access to the best seats in the house as well as free food, free Red Bull, high speed internet and air condition at the media tent. It really made the three days we were there much more bearable. Some of the photos here were shot by Lindsay. She is learning fast and is becoming quite the shutter bug herself.



TRAINING RUNS CLICK HERE.

QUALIFYING RUNS CLICK HERE.

FINALS CLICK HERE.

Last month there was a huge fire just east of my house in Sierra Madre. This was the closest I have been to a big wildfire. I was fortunate enough to be coming back from the beach right when it started and before the police really closed down the roads. I had just enough of a window of time to be able to get up close to the burn area and take some photos of the helicopters fighting the fires. I focused most of my attention on the aircraft. I wish I had put a little more effort into capturing the human reaction aspect. Unfortunately this wont be the last fire in LA.

This was my second attempt at getting water photos out at Jalama. Unfortunately this time the conditions were not as favorable as the first time. The water was absolutely frigid; the water was somewhere in the high 40's. I had a 5/3 wetsuit, 6mm booties, 3mm gloves, 3mm hood and a helmet on and I still got chilled. Jumping in the water here gives you an instant headache along with the thought of big fish swimming around with you.

These are just a few climbing photos from a quick weekend trip to Joshua Tree National Park with Justin, a friend from college and Marc, one of my Colleagues from JPL.



FOR MORE PHOTOS CLICK HERE.

Venice was our last stop on our little get away. I felt that Venice was a little over commercialized; there were street vendors everywhere trying to sell you crap on every corner. Other than that, Venice was beautiful. You could easily spend days walking around all the canals and back alleyways. Eventually though each canal starts to look like the previous 100 that were just passed by. I would love to go back again when I have more than a day and a half and not at the end of a long trip.



FOR PHOTOS FROM THE ENTIRE TRIP CLICK HERE.

Florence was by far our favorite place that we visited in Italy. The entire city felt so much more authentic than the big city of rome. It was much easier to get around and the people and food blew Rome out of the water. We found some really local restaurants and wine bars that had wonderful atmosphere that we enjoyed almost entirely to ourselves. While we were eating or drinking we were able to talk to either the owners or a nice waitress and learn about the area a little more from a local view. If we were to go back again Florence would be top of the list of places to spend the majority of our time.



FOR PHOTOS FROM THE ENTIRE TRIP CLICK HERE.

Sometime way back in October of 2007 Lindsay and I were still just good friends and we had randomly decided that we were going to go to Italy in the spring, with no idea what was to come. In December, right around Christmas time, we bought our plane tickets and made the trip official. Our plan was to spend 10 days touring Italy; Rome, Florence and Venice. Our first stop on the trip was three and a half days in Rome where we toured all the big sites; saw a lot of ruins and ate some really great food. It is almost impossible to sum up any portion of the trip in words; it was all too overwhelming and incredible so I will just let the photos do the talking. The best part of the trip to Rome was asking Lindsay to marry me and her saying YES!



FOR PHOTOS FROM THE ENTIRE TRIP CLICK HERE.

The Huntington Gardens is another place that I like to go to from time to time to relax and just take photos for the fun of taking photos. This particular trip was on a beautiful spring day with Lindsay at my side.

El Matador Beach is one of my favorite places in Malibu to just sit around and relax in the evenings. I shoot these same rock formations every time I go there and I am always looking for a new angle or new lighting. Its fun to have a place to return to over and over again to see if you can catch a fleeting moment when the lighting is new and perfect. I still have yet to get a day as good as the very first time I shot there.

I wish I could even begin to do a description of Joe Dihl justice. While Lindsay and I were on our way up the coast of California we made a quick morning pit stop in Davenport, CA to do a portrait shoot for an article in Windsurfing Magazine. Joe is one of the most modest people I have ever met; he lives a very simple life in Davenport repairing sails and making boardbags. I was fortunate to have Lindsay with me while I was shooting portraits because he was much more relaxed and was able to talk to her and forget that I was there clicking away with my camera. The end result was a great set of candid and posed portraits of a spectacular person. Joe's shop was full of all kinds of artifacts and memorabilia from the history of windsurfing; so much character.

In late January, Lindsay Wood, who at the time was just my good friend, came out to California to hang out and explore the Big Sur Coast with me. I never thought that her coming out to California for those few days would change my life forever. By the end of the trip we were dating and just a few months later we were in Italy and engaged. We spent a really great long weekend road tripping up the coast, camping under the stars and redwoods and eating at 5 star restaurants in San Francisco.

In January I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to work on some photos for a potential National Geographic story. For the photos I went out in the field with Greg Asner from the Carnegie Institute to document a field campaign to measure biodiversity in certain areas of the Hawaiian rain forests. All the locations were in an area of the Big Island called Wao Kele'O Puna; on the southeast side of the island. This area is very close to Hawaii Volcanos National Park and while we were there, there were actually live lava flows. Our day started off well before sunrise with a drive through dense fog out to a wellhead site to wait for the helicopter to show up to take us out to the sites. With the heavy fog we didn't think the helicopter pilot would be coming in, but to our surprise we heard the sound of rotors coming in low over the canopy. The helicopter pilot, Dave, landed at the wellhead and we crammed ourselves and our gear into the helicopter and headed off into the forest. Our landing site was right in the middle of what was just a month earlier a very active lava flow. The area that we landed at still had steam coming out of holes where trees used to stand and it was possible to through dry leaves into holes and have them instantly catch on fire. It was an incredible experience to see all the thermal energy still locked in the hardened lava. From the lava flow we started a pretty strenuous hike through super dense rain forest. The pace was really slow as we tried not to fall through hidden holes in the forest floor. When we got to the plot to be measured Greg and his crew setup a center point and then worked their way out from the center measuring various plant species starting at the ground and working up to various regions high in the canopy. This gave a general idea of the density of all the various species of plant in the area and that data could be used to compare to other data from instruments in airplanes. The measurements were repeated for several other plots over the course of the day. At the end of it all we got back in the helicopter and did a quick flight over the most recent active lava flow a few miles from our landing zone. The lava was so hot that even from a couple hundred feet above the heat was almost too much to face; it was like sticking your head in a hot oven or furnace. In my photos I wanted to capture a sense of how difficult the task was that Greg and his team were trying to do. The entire day was a huge orchestrated event involving dozens of people and multiple teams being flown to plots all over Wao Kele'O Puna all in an effort to understand what was going on in one of the last lowland rain forests in Hawaii. Greg is a driven person and his dedication to understanding the biology of the Hawaiian rain forests in an effort to protect them is incredible. I was honored to be a part of such a great team of people. I was able to work with Greg as a collaborator through my work with NASA and also as a photographer documenting a huge undertaking. This story is ongoing and the idea was to shoot photos for National Geographic but there is no end to the story just yet. I still feel I have photos that I have yet to take that will let me finish the story from a visual perspective. There are a few photos up front here and the full set of images from this one day can be found by clicking the link below.



FOR MORE IMAGES CLICK HERE