David Paul Bayles

GP: How green is your business - what green business practices do you embrace?

DPB: Life and work are woven so tightly for me that it’s not possible to separate them, so I won’t try. I slowly began turning green thirty years ago. To put myself through photography school, I worked as a logger in the forests of the Sierra Nevada. That experience caused me to think deeply about my personal impact on the environment and it later sparked a personal photography project that eventually became a book published by the Sierra Club (Urban Forest – Images of Trees in the Human Landscape).

Green practices are basic and include: pushing the lifespan of equipment as far as possible and replace only when necessary, re-use whenever possible and reduce always. When I graduated from Brooks Institute in 1980, I had great 4x5, medium and small format equipment. My assumption was that I would only need to add a few lenses here and there throughout my life. Now we are seduced every few years by more and better technology, so the three R’s mantra of basic environmental living has to be part of every purchase decision.

GP: How green are your products - what green products/components do you offer?

DPB: For my personal work, I print on cotton papers with carbon inks, mount with water soluble adhesives and mat on cotton rag boards. I save and re-use boxes for shipping when possible, save my newspapers for padding when shipping is necessary (all un-reuseable cardboard is layered on the ground between the planting rows of our organic garden – we cover it with straw and don’t need to mow or weed).
My commercial work is web driven so I deliver the client a DVD – no printing is necessary.
The single largest green component to life is the ten-year carbon neutral plan my finacee Lea Houston and I are developing. We live outside Corvallis, Oregon on ten acres of forest and pasture land. We are converting our barn to a studio, gallery, workshop and neighborhood movie / dance hall. We dreamed of this barn conversion, but weren’t sure it was the right thing to do. Then a huge windstorm came, and because our neighbors clear cut their 100 acres of forest, many of our trees blew down. We decided to mill the logs into lumber and begin our barn conversion. There are many green decisions to make in this kind of project. Our walls vary from 8-10 inches thick and the ceiling has 15-16 inches of insulation. We are purchasing used doors and windows from our local Habitat for Humanity Re-store. The patio over the front doors will be a living roof, and eventually we hope all our rain gutters will drain into collection tanks that will irrigate our garden and landscaping. Solar panels are in the near future, and … you get the idea. It is a work in progress toward a desire to share our Dreaming Forest Farm with others in the pursuit of life enrichment, collaboration and community.

GP: Why did you choose to offer green products and implement green business practices?

DPB: It’s too complex and would be wrong to label guilt, but, being part of cutting down forests while simultaneously loving them, caused me to ask a lot of questions about my own use and abuse of natural resources.

GP: How has offering green products and implementing green business practices affected your company?

DPB: Not to be glib, but I sleep better at night knowing I am trying. My clients don’t know about the choices I make, but If I had a portrait or wedding studio I would definitely make it part of my marketing.

GP: What are your hopes for a greener photographic industry?

DPB: My biggest dream would be that we could convince all the camera and printer manufacturers to ‘own’ the equipment for its lifespan. When a piece of equipment is dead it goes back to each manufacturer for dismantling, recycling and re-using. This would mean changes in the original design and manufacture so that re-using and re-cycling were easy and profitable. If we photographers could force our industry to do that, other industries would follow.

GP: What is your favorite eco website or eco-product that we may not have heard of?
DPB: http://www.treehugger.com
http://www.postcarbon.com I like their ‘museletter’ sometimes a bit tech heavy
http://www.orionmagazine.org

Thanks so much to David Paul Bayles for taking the time to answer our questions!  If you have an idea for a Spotlight feature or interview, let us know!

David is offering GP members 20% off a signed copy of his new book Urban Forests for the month of June.  Just mention GP when placing your order!  Don't miss out!!