Woody Walters

The trade-offs between commerce and art are so often repeated we tend to accept them as irrefutable truths. Artists, we believe, have to choose between starving or giving up their art to make a decent living.

Then along comes an artist like Woody Walters who turns that entire equation inside out. Throughout the 1980s, Walters worked as a commercial photographer, specializing in lifestyle images for high-end resorts, while pursuing his fine art photography in his spare time. He might have continued splitting his time this way indefinitely, but an apparent disaster intervened: Walters discovered the two-person agency representing his commercial work had defrauded him (along with several other photographers) of thousands of dollars in fees.

As he contemplated what to do next, a friend suggested Walters try the art show circuit. Intrigued, Walters rented a booth at the Sunfest Art Festival, a weekend show held every late summer in West Palm Beach, Florida. He displayed framed examples of his art photography, primarily black-and-white landscapes, and soon found himself accepting cash payments from excited customers. "I realized I could easily make $40-50,000 an image," Walters says, "and I never looked back." The numbers spoke for themselves. Instead of getting paid, one image at a time, for photographs that someone else had told him what, when, and how to shoot, Walters could shoot the photographs he wanted, and sell the same images over and over again.

Walters' first foray into photography had little to do with aesthetics, however. His father, who had worked briefly as a professional portrait photographer himself, gave Walters a Super 8 movie camera when he was in junior high. Walters was taking karate lessons (he eventually advanced to black belt, second degree), and immediately set out to make "karate movies."

"We had a railroad track in our back yard. My friends and I would make movies of things like a little girl walking down the tracks, getting harassed by a couple of guys, and then a boy coming in to save the day."

Then, when he was a high school sophomore, a local gallery hosted a show of Ansel Adams photography. "The minute I saw those images, I knew that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life." Adams became Walters' inspiration and, later, friend. After Walters completed Hawkeye Community College's professional photography program, he wrote to Adams. "I sent Ansel one of my prints with a letter telling him how his work had influenced me." This letter led to a correspondence that continued until Adams' death in 1984.

Adams' influence on Walters spans both subject matter and film format. Throughout the '80s and '90s, Walters concentrated on black-and-white landscapes, including his signature images of lightning-split cumulus clouds, taken off the Florida coast. Nearly all of his work has been captured on medium- and large-format film. His cameras include a 4x5 Wisner technical field camera, a handmade wooden field 4x5 view camera. "I've had the wooden camera for 11 years," he says. "I love the romance of shooting with a handcrafted, wood camera, and with a name like Woody, I guess I had to have a wooden camera."

Walters shows similar loyalty in his choice of film. He's been using Kodak Professional Technical Pan Film for years. He says, "It's by far the sharpest film out there. There's nothing that compares in terms of resolution." He also uses Kodak paper exclusively for his prints: Kodak Professional Polymax Fine-Art Paper for his black-and-white and Kodak Professional Supra Endura Paper for his color prints. "It's a great paper. I love the tonality and contrast, and in particular the color saturation."

Adams also gave Walters tips on technique. "Ansel's greatest secret is that it's the background that makes or breaks an image," Walters says. "Anything can be a subject as long as you frame it against the right background."

In Walters' landscape work, he learned to let the weather "perform the background." He says, "You have to go out in the worst kind of weather. Ninety percent of good landscape photography is letting the weather dictate when you shoot."

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For his Florida lightning photographs, Walters benefited by the predictability of the local weather patterns. "You can almost set your watch by the thunderstorms in that part of the country," he says. "The clouds start building about 2:00 in the afternoon. By 4:00 the thunderheads are forming. Then around dusk, you can start capturing lightning as the sunlight fades."

Walters' kinship with Adams includes a similar love for nature and its beauties. He goes camping frequently, and considers "getting out into the woods" every two or three weeks essential to his mental health. "The natural world is full of miracles," he says. "But you have to have ears to see them. You have to be ready when they whisper to you."

Today, Walters lives in Iowa. The primary reason is Hawkeye: Walters now