Another sad week for the fly-fishing community with the passing of Charlie Meyers (so close to the passing of Rusty Gates). Much more about Charlie from his close friends and colleagues here and here than I can write on FF&W. My mother has a funny remembrance about Charlie, though, involving a particularly rough plane ride across [...]

We started 2010 with fly drawings, so why not tie one on? Kel leaned over my shoulder and took this shot one day as we were fishing an old spring creek haunt. No real set-up, no real intent, just literally a quick snap-shot using dead-stock camera settings. Art? No. But it still means a lot [...]

Feelin’ lazy reflective today. Gonna go cast my MPR, work on the book series, and perhaps watch a few minutes of “Once in Blue Moon” (while simultaneously lamenting the fact that I do not currently have two tickets to the South Island sitting on my kitchen table). And while I do all of that, here [...]

A quick sketch of a Loop-Wing Sulphur, with thoughts of Rusty Gates and the spring hatches on the Au Sable.

I just heard that long-time family friend, Rusty Gates—of the famed Gates Au Sable Lodge and fly shop in Michigan—has died. Our family has had a connection to Rusty, his family, and the lodge for decades, and I grew up fishing the river almost every spring for about as long as I can remember. I [...]

As some FF&W readers likely already know, Jack Gartside died last night. Jack was a long-time friend of our family, and was someone who I always looked forward to seeing at shows and so forth. If you aren’t familiar with Jack, just check out his Web site for a taste of his legendarily entertaining and [...]

Montana’s Gallatin River holds so much history for me that I sometimes feel like I’m wading into a fly-fishing time-warp as I rig up on its banks. From my first trout to my first shadow cast, the Gallatin has been a part of my angling life literally longer than I can remember. It is such [...]

Just a little nostalgia from the way-back days of my youth (well, when I was 21)… As a few FF&W readers may know, I did a small portion of the fly-fishing-specific storyboard work on A River Runs Through It (especially some of the pick-up shots that needed to be acquired after principle photography was finished). [...]

Just a little story as a warm-up before the upcoming three-post series on terrestrial fishing… I remember one afternoon in the high-altitude meadows of Yellowstone National Park. It was a summer more than a decade ago, and I had hiked back into Slough Creek under a blistering mid-day sun. The sharp climb and elevation combined [...]

Yeah, one (well, two) more from the archives. Can’t help myself (I have some actual educational posts coming up after this, I promise). I am also hoping to get some repeats of these shots within the next month. These are from last September—sight-fishing, small flies, and a slightly over-excited husband. The morning had dawned brilliant, [...]

Once I started digging through old slides, I couldn’t stop. Not much in the way of self-deprecation here (other than the obligatory, “What’s she doing with you?” jokes), just a shot that I love from one of my favorite Wisconsin salmon days. This fish was actually two fish at one point. Kel spotted this king, [...]

Found this lurking in a binder full of slides. GB was lookin’ young, I was lookin’ like a 70′s leftover (although a certain girl didn’t seem to mind), and the helicopter was lookin’ broken—but it was still a great trip. The salmon may not have been overly impressed with my hair, but they still seemed [...]

I’ve been doing more and more work with photo-based monotones and duotones in (Adobe) Photoshop and Illustrator. When converted to vector paths in Illustrator, an image like the one above can become wall-size with no loss in quality. While I’ve used this type of Photoshop-to-Illustrator workflow for various projects in the past, it has only [...]

(Another post along the lines of my remembrance of Mel. This one appeared as a foreword for Ernest Schwiebert’s two-volume, Nymphs project. If you don’t know much about Ernie, I’d encourage you to read some of his works—both technical and storytelling.) Before Ernie passed away in late 2005 (has it really been that long?), my father and [...]