In museum exhibit, Jones shines

 Acclaimed Troy wildlife photographer Don Jones has a new show of some of his favorite work at the Hockaday Museum of Art in Kalispell. 

“I thought it would be fun to do something that doesn’t have staple lines running through it,” Jones joked to a capacity crowd at the museum last week. He has more than 750 magazine covers to his credit spanning his 25-year career, but this is his first major show of his fine art. 

His work has appeared in Field and Stream, National Wildlife, Audubon, BBC, National Geographic, Time, Sierra, Ranger Rick and Outdoor Life, to name a few.

“I’ve opened magazines and said to myself ‘Oh look, they put a bullseye on my elk,’” he quipped.

The show features more than two dozen of Jones’s favorites, from the neotropical western tanager printed on a 30-inch wide canvas to a grizzly bear chasing a frantic salmon, its eyes wide as its head busts through a rapid.

One of his more memorable photos is one of a mountain lion, looking straight at the camera. Jones was looking to photograph mule deer in the Mission Valley when he spotted the lion below his vehicle.

He took more than 100 photos of the cat and then by chance looked at the screen on his digital camera. 

They were all soft. Jones quickly changed the focus setting and rattled off five or six more frames before the cat disappeared. They were the only photos that were sharp.

He almost blew the photo of a lifetime. Seeing a mountain lion is a rare event.

“I’ve seen maybe 10 in my career,” he said. “And probably a thousand have seen me.”

His work takes him across the continent. He says he’s on the road about 180 days a year, shooting pictures, from the Arctic Circle to Texas.

While today’s modern cameras have excellent light meters, Jones still uses manual exposure. It allows him not only to capture the correct exposure, but to bring mood to his subjects.

He comes from the old school of film, where there was little room for error shooting slide films.

“Shooting slides, you had to get it right,” he said.

Most of his bear photos are taken from the safety of a vehicle. 

He doesn’t pursue bears in the backcountry, he said. And he also keeps his distance from other creatures as well.

Jones uses huge telephoto lenses — a 600 mm lens on a Canon D1x for much of his work. 

“I don’t want to push animals,” he said. “Every animal has a buffer.”

He also works from blinds, particularly with birds. Blinds allow a photographer “to be that fly on the wall,” he said.

But one of his most extreme shoots was while photographing musk ox in the Arctic Circle. 

The huge beasts are notoriously fickle. A big bull kept pursuing Jones, even though Jones wasn’t even close to it. And the temperatures were extreme. 

It was 10 below zero and the wind was blowing 30 mph. His eyes kept freezing shut.

While there are many wildlife photographers out working today, Jones advice to others was to bring their own vision to the craft. 

He noted a saying from an old friend.

“I don’t care if it’s a garbage can,” he said. “If it’s in good light, I’ll shoot it.”

His show runs at the museum until Jan. 21.