In addition, Ian will get you ready to embark on your own photography adventure with gear check lists and a look inside Ian’s photo bag, photo essays, countless galleries and more. The app will feature videos and give you the opportunity to not just look at photos but learn and get involved in important environmental causes world wide.

Stay tuned for the release of the app this spring!

I’m also incredibly proud of my photography and motion clip stock agency, Tandem Stills + Motion, which grew into it’s own by the end of year. As of December 31st, the company was churning dozens of licenses a month as well as a healthy profit, no small feat in today’s economy. I was proud to represent the work of many colleagues whom for many years I’ve looked up to, people like Justin Bailie, Karine Aigner and Jeff Yonover. I’m also proud of all the new, amazing talent on the scene that have trusted us to represent their unique vision, photographers Ben Herndon, Patrick Brandenburg, Brett Holman and Ethan Welty. January is already set to be a record month for the agency and our images are proudly running in nearly every major publication in the country from National Geographic to Backpacker, Men’s Journal, Outside, Mountain Living and more. 2012 will be epic.

     
2011 was also a major year for my own images showing up in print. From a major tourism advertising campaign for the state of Montana to the Autumn 2011 cover of The Nature Conservancy magazine, an organization that is truly a force for nature. It also heralded in the beginning of my mainstream multimedia reportage on TNC’s iPad App.

      
This of course was also another big year for my dialogue-building program in Afghanistan known as Wilderness Diplomacy. This effort uses America’s greatest environmental resources – and my photographs of them – as a way to open dialogue. The initiative found new life as the cover story of Sierra Magazine’s May/June issue. To date, many different divisions of our government use my book on our national parks as a diplomatic tool, including the Department of Defense, State Department, Department of the Interior and National Park Service.

We of course can’t forget my celebrity debut with the guys of hit television show One Tree Hill in our own, outdoor mantastic voyage, Wild Life: A New Generation of Wild, a 15-minute multimedia experience that followed me and the team through the wilds of Florida’s back country bringing the outdoors to literally millions of viewers around the world. Within a week, we amassed over 750,000 views on Facebook, 10,000 twitter followers and a following in over 120 countries. I realized then the power of having a voice and a viewership and I couldn’t be more grateful for all the amazing words our fans shared with us.

Of course I’m incredibly excited about the publication of book 2 (sort of), the paperback edition of The National Parks: Our American Landscape.  This companion to the hardcover book of the same name was released in April 2011 (the hardcover in August 2009) by Earth Aware Editions. The sales have been strong and it’s already in dozens of National Parks across the country. The new book wasn’t just a reprint and redesign in a smaller format, but I also managed to add over 40 new images and parks that weren’t in the first one.

And last but not least and certainly most recent, the beginning of my first feature documentary film Healing Waters began principal photography in India in October/November. We’ve already assembled a rough cut and I can’t tell you how excited I am about where this beautifully rich film will go. I hope that this project will enlighten and engage people on the importance of our planets 2nd largest river, it’s dwindling health and the incredible effort to save it. This may possibly be the largest restoration effort ever undertaken.

I’m excited for 2012! I’m excited to share footage and a first look at Healing Waters as well as some other stories I shot, including a beautiful feature on Yosemite National Park’s lesser known places, which is scheduled for the Spring 2012 issue of National Parks magazine.

Thank you to everyone for a great year and I’m excited about the one ahead!
Ian

The Ganges is the second largest flowing river in the world, after the Amazon, and feeds life into the Indian subcontinent. Over the last several weeks, our crew has followed the Ganges from it’s start in the lower Himalayan Mountains in the Indo-Tibetan border region to New Delhi, where the river is almost unrecognizable from the pollution it encounters along it’s journey. Eventually flowing into Bangladesh and out to sea in the Bay of Bengal, the Ganges is a lifeline to one of the largest human populations on Earth…and one of the fastest growing populations.

In our first two weeks of filming, we not only explored the river and it’s natural sources, but also spoke to UNESCO scientists and leaders, spiritual guru’s and leading Indian political figures who understand the intense struggle and challenge it will be to bring the Ganges, and it’s tributary river the Jamuna, back to their full glory. While the story will last over many years, our first short video installment is in the works and we look forward to sharing it with you soon.

http://visitmt.com/montana-stories/shaped-by-glaciers/

I’m on the Island of Hawaii (the big island) wrapping up a multi-state assignment. I padded the trip by a few days and managed to squeeze out a day in one of my favorite places in the country, the Waipio Valley. A lush, tropical valley on an otherwise barren, black lava-rock island, the Waipio is a sacred place, one of the top sacred places in all of the Hawaiian Islands. As an almost immediate selling point, almost everything you find in the valley is edible. You can’t imagine the scent that precedes the taste; pomelos, tangerines, avocados, star fruit, liliquoi, coffee, bananas and on and on. For each of those, there are a half dozen various species, each with their own unique flavor. What you can’t eat, falls to the floor and ferments, casting a scent reminiscent of a Napa wine cellar, though it often competes with the breeze of the nearby salty blue, Pacific Ocean.

All of that aside, the valley is an anomaly. It was once the place where King Kamehameha ruled over the Hawaiian Islands and is still considered an important place, culturally, with many of the jungle-laden cliffs adorned with more than just foliage and waterfalls but also the tombs of countless Hawaiian princesses. Against that backdrop is also the utter isolation and wild that comes with this far-removed place – only one road in and out and it is only passable with true 4×4 vehicles and even then, the numerous rivers you must cross just to get a mile or two may flood with little warning, stranding you on one side or the other.

Alas, once in, you may meet the crux of my story, Coconut Christopher. Once a Californian, Christopher decided – at an early age – to live a wild life in the Waipio. In 2002, he forgave the luxuries of modernity and went raw. Literally. A diet of only what he could harvest or seed in this lush valley. If picking his own food wasn’t enough, avoiding cooking it was detrimental to his philosophy. Today I met him for the first time, quite wild-eyed and full of charisma. He was intriguing, not just from his extensive knowledge of the flora around us, of which his gaze on a ripe fruit would cause a tangent in conversation, but also because this young man chose a life of  raw, wild living over one of technological-2011 prowess. At one point he recalled being cutting edge with one of the first motorola flip phones. Today he marvels at cross-pollination of species to bring out the vibrancy of flavor in a banana.

I didn’t have enough time to scratch the surface of this complicated jungle fixture but I was assured within moments that he’d be here for awhile and I might come back to catch up more. If he isn’t here, he’s probably on a multi-week sojourn to the farthest depths of the forest where he maintains his many “gardens” fruit, not-so-forbidden. In my only moment of possible photography, he offered me and my companions freshly squeezed sugar cane juice. Essentially, sugar water. Lacking cups in the rain forest, he quickly procured his saw and fashioned cups from fallen bamboo. Within moments, we were modernized, jungle-style.

I couldn’t think of something more liberating than his life.  Imagine knowing you could walk for 2-weeks without a cell-phone or even a single ounce of food in a backpack. Would you feel safe? Secure? Coconut Christopher did. He shows that with knowledge, comes power and that knowledge has become a rarity of who we are. Without knowing where we come from, namely the land, how can we ever hope to understand who we are? I hope one day, we can all walk together, not for weeks, but forever into the unknown with nothing.

WILD LIFE: A New Generation of Wild

Los Angeles, CA: Actors James Lafferty (One Tree Hill), Stephen Colletti (One Tree Hill, Laguna Beach) and Stuart Lafferty (Death Sentence, One Tree Hill), will team up with Award- Winning Nature Photographer and Author Ian Shive, for a special unscripted pilot exploring some of the America’s wildest places.

A five-minute preview will be unveiled on GenerationWild.tv on Monday, April 18th. Behind-the- Scenes photos, journal entries from the field, and a 30-second sneak preview will go live on the site April 1, 2011.

The production is a not-for-profit initiative and will be produced by the Los Angeles based company Wild Collective, LLC.

About Wild Collective: Wild Collective is a Los Angeles-based production company. Past projects include creating dynamic content for the Dallas Cowboys, Apple Computers, PBS, Insight Editions and Current TV. For more information visit WildCollective.com

Click here to download a PDF of the press release