As a trained scientist, Greg Owens has for years written, sometimes even about himself, in a passive-voice, third-person style.  He hates it.

I grew up just south of Atlanta, and while my dad learned photography and darkroom techniques when I was a kid, I never had any interest in them then.  After graduating from the University of West Georgia with a degree in chemistry, I took a three-week road trip with my best friend to Waterton Lakes/Glacier, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Arches national parks.  I took a point-and-shoot (film!) camera with me on our backpacking and sightseeing excursions, but when I got back my prints, I was distressed about the huge difference I perceived between the prints in front of me and the way I felt at the places I photographed.  During my first year of graduate school in Los Angeles, I began visiting the Sierra Nevada, especially Yosemite, and the southern California deserts, especially Death Valley, and found that the gulf between my emotions and my photographs was only growing into something like the Grand Canyon. Then, my dad sent me a copy of Galen Rowell's Mountain Light, and my interest in landscape photography took on a life of its own.  The Sierra Nevada in the spring, summer, and fall and Death Valley in the winter became my havens, my escape from the brain-pounding rigors of the laboratory, and the landscape photography became my creative outlet.  After graduating from UCLA, my wife and I moved to Salt Lake City, where I began teaching chemistry at the University of Utah while turning my lenses to the Wasatch Front, the redrock canyons of southern Utah, and the mountains of western Wyoming.  I taught chemistry at Utah for a dozen years before moving in 2013 to western Colorado, where I now live with my wife and our canine and feline children in the tiny community of Glade Park, near Grand Junction.  I still teach chemistry at Utah but from a distance.

The logo is an homage to my background in chemistry.  (Yes, we chemists used element symbols long before Breaking Bad ever was conceived.)  The box around the O suggests the element oxygen, while the 16 and 8 leave no doubt about the reference:  16 is the mass number (the number of protons + the number of neutrons in the atomic nucleus) of the most common isotope of oxygen, and 8 is the atomic number (the number of protons in the atomic nucleus) of oxygen, the element's defining characteristic.  In addition to being essential to virtually all life on Earth in its diatomic form, oxygen also is pervasive nearly everywhere we look, especially in the outdoors:  the color of the sky on a clear day, minerals in the rocks atop a summit, that incomparable Utah powder, the deep blue of glacial ice or a glacial tarn.