Photographer's Biography - Stephen J. Krieg

Fine art landscape and nature photographer Steve Krieg is a native of northern Pennsylvania's rural Allegheny Plateau, where he grew up hunting, fishing, trapping, and dirt biking in the steep forested hills there. Early on he developed a love of photography, mostly of landscapes and nature, packing along a 35mm camera during his explorations of the surrounding woods and streams.

After receiving his Bachelor of Science degree in Forest Science from Penn State University in 1976, he accepted a seasonal forestry position with the U.S. Forest Service on the Kootenai National Forest in northwestern Montana. It was there he made his first wilderness backpacking trips, after which he lost all interest in dirt biking, preferring silence and solitude over noise and pollution.

The following year he was hired as a forester for the Colorado State Forest Service in Fort Collins, working in Dutch Elm Disease control and urban and community forestry. Subsequent assignments took him to Denver, Dillon, and Granby districts, assisting private landowners with forest management. Numerous wilderness backpacking trips in the Colorado Rockies were undertaken during this time.

An opportunity to work in the big timber of the Pacific Northwest lured him to Neah Bay, Washington, an employee of the Makah Indian Tribe on their reservation at the far northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle and the Puget Sound region. An introduction to ocean kayaking, along with more backpacking in the Olympic and Cascade mountains, plus frequent clam digging along the coast, provided additional outdoor excursions.

A couple of years after that, Steve was hired as Assistant Tribal Forester for the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians in Siletz, Oregon, on the central Oregon coast. He was later promoted to Tribal Forester, overseeing all aspects of timber sale engineering and layout, logging, and reforestation on the tribal reservation lands. It was while at Siletz that he participated in a 50-plus mile wilderness traverse of the Bailey Range in Olympic National Park. As Tribal Forester he helped represent the Tribe at annual Indian forestry conferences, which allowed him to backpack in Alaska and the Grand Canyon. He also started training in martial arts, achieving a first degree black belt in Tae Kwon-do, teaching for two years.

Another life change drew him to Dayton, Ohio in 1990. During that period he spent a season on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, working as the Mate on a 32-foot charter fishing boat on the North Atlantic. Then it was back to Ohio, where he sold his fine art landscape photographs at art festivals for a time, before returning to the world of a day job, first in commercial portraiture, then photo lab work. He learned television production at Dayton Access Television, where he produced two short nature programs using original video footage, in addition to helping on other producers' shows, both in the studio and in the field. Later, attending Visual Communications classes at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, he learned Website and graphic design.

He has since returned to the West, and is currently living in the heart of Canyon Country, on the Kaibab Plateau region of northern Arizona.

Steve has shot with both 35mm and 4x5-inch film cameras, but now shoots exclusively digital. A longtime darkroom nut, these days he is most interested in the "digital darkroom", enjoying working on his photographs in the daylight of his home studio in the country, instead of in the dark. His main interests are in making archival fine art landscape prints on the most current giclee (high end inkjet) printers, and continually developing his multimedia and illustration skills, especially as they might be applied in the communications and environmental education fields.

Contact Steve