Washington Post article about my stamp
Chesapeake photo becomes a stamp
Correction:
The article misspelled the last name of WAMU radio host Kojo Nnamdi.
It also misplaced the South River. It is in Maryland, not Virginia. This
version has been corrected.
By Patricia Sullivan
September 25, 2012
Cameron Davidson has been shooting aerial photos of the Chesapeake Bay since the late 1980s, so he knows the landscape as well as anyone with a
camera and lens. Sometime in the early 1990s, when he spotted the
shallow creek that winds through the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he knew it would make a memorable image.
“I’m always drawn to curvy patterns I see in marshes,” he said. “The Blackwater — I keep going back to it.”
One of those dramatic green-and-blue photos, shot on film from a small
plane, is going to be one of 15 stamps featured in a new U.S. Postal
Service series called Earthscapes Forever. Some of the other stamps
feature wilderness icebergs in Alaska, saltwater evaporation ponds in
northern California, sawmill-bound log rafts in Idaho and a New York
City skyscraper. Two were captured by NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite.
“We get 40,000 ideas for stamps and only about 2,000 make the cut,” said
Mark Saunders, the Postal Service communications official. “He’s really
the best of the best.”
Davidson, who has published his work in National Geographic, Vanity Fair, Audobon and Smithsonian magazines, is happy that his work will be used on envelopes going through the world’s mailboxes, but he’s most enthusiastic about raising awareness of the complex natural phenomenon called the Chesapeake watershed. The author of a 2011 book by that name (who also published some of the photos in The Washington Post magazine in 2009), he told local radio host Kojo Nnamdi last fall that his photos are “vignettes.”
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One of the US Postal Service's Earthscapes winning image, by Cameron Davidson of Alexandria, Va. (Courtesy of USPS)
“You can’t shoot all of it at once. I wanted to show the little parts of the bay to make a greater whole,” he said then.
From
the deck of a sailboat on Virginia’s South River at the southern end of
the Chesapeake watershed, the Alexandria-based Davidson on Tuesday
talked about the impact of New York and West Virginia land use on the
rich ecosystem that many residents consider a summer playground.
“All
these little creeks, all these towns are part of the Chesapeake Bay,”
Davidson said. “I’ve had people say to me ‘I didn’t know the Susquehanna
was part of the Bay.’ ”
The stamps in the series will be issued Oct. 1 at NASA Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt during a 10:30 a.m. ceremony, which will be open to the
public. Davidson will talk about how he shot his photo. NASA officials
also will talk about their images in the collection, a view of the Mount
St. Helens volcanic crater and Kansas croplands with center-pivot
irrigation.
Patricia SullivanPatricia
Sullivan covered government, politics and other regional issues in
Arlington County and Alexandria until her retirement in April 2021. She
worked in Illinois, Florida, Montana and California before joining The
Post in November 2001.