Joshua Cripps: California's Sierra Nevada
Harvey Milk Terminal 1
This world is beautiful. It’s a beauty that pervades, invigorates, pacifies, and overjoys—beauty to experience, to remember, and to share.
—Joshua Cripps
Joshua Cripps: California's Sierra Nevada
California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, which spans 400 miles north to south and seventy miles east to west, contains a breathtaking variety of landscapes, vistas, natural alpine valleys, and high mountain lakes. To the east, the mountain range descends dramatically into the high desert country. From towering granite peaks to picturesque lakes and fantastic forests, the massive region’s splendor has attracted gold miners, adventure travelers, and especially photographers.
Landscape photographer Joshua Cripps was born in Los Gatos but was raised in the small mountain town of Sonora, California, where he grew up climbing on rocks and camping beneath pine trees. Cripps studied engineering at the University of Southern California and later secured a position helping to design communication satellites for Boeing, which offered him the opportunity to travel globally.
In 2006, before a trip to Alaska, his simple point-and-shoot camera was damaged, prompting the purchase of a digital single-lens reflex camera. Cripps’ engineering and analytical skills enhanced his technical knowledge of the mechanics of photography, and his passion for capturing images blossomed. Shortly afterward, the lure of the great outdoors proved to be overwhelming. He quit his job and embraced photography as a means to capture the beauty of the Sierra backcountry.
For Cripps, photography is a medium to experience and share the wonders of the planet. He believes the camera can capture beauty in a powerful and transformative way. Through photography, he is finely attuned to the ever-changing interaction of patterns and shapes, light and shadows, drama and subtlety.
His work was featured in Outdoor Photographer and Popular Photography. He is a contributing writer for Phlearn–a web-based site focused on photography and Photoshop. Cripps has received support from Think Tank Photo, Kinesis Photo Gear, Formatt-Hitech Filters, and Topaz Labs. He resides in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains and teaches landscape-photography workshops throughout the year.
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