Randy Olson, Melissa Farlow Photography

  • Portfolio
  • About
  • Contact
  • Archive
    • All Galleries
    • Search
    • Cart
    • Lightbox
    • Client Area

Search Results

Refine Search
Match all words
Match any word
Prints
Personal Use
Royalty-Free
Rights-Managed
(leave unchecked to
search all images)
Next
361 images found

Loading ()...

  • Three volcanoes, quiet now, formed Easter Island half a million years ago. Rano Raraku has a lagoon-filled crater seen in an aerial photo of the island.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1477354.JPG
  • Three volcanoes, now dormant, formed Easter Island half a million years ago.  Rano Kau is the largest crater on the island with an aerial view from the mirador on the headlands. Inside is a lagoon of fresh water filling the crater that is almost a mile wide and 1,000 feet high above the Pacific Ocean in Rapa Nui National Park.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1477354-2.JPG
  • A braided river ecosystem for salmon spawning. At the top of this photograph is the Sea of Okhotsk, and below it the Oblukovina River. They flow past wetlands created by heavy rain on the west side of Kamchatka. <br />
<br />
Wetlands are the primary sign of a healthy salmon ecosystem and clouds of mosquitoes form where insects are a main food source. Salmon create a mass migration engine that brings marine-derived nutrients into river ecosystems, and the carcasses fertilize the entire Pacific Rim.<br />
<br />
Salmon bring marine-derived nutrients from the Kamchatka shelf in the Sea of Okhotsk into the eight major river systems that run off the middle range of mountains that divide Kamchatka in half.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1260979.TIF
  • A braided river ecosystem snakes through the tundra and is used by salmon spawning.<br />
<br />
Salmon bring marine-derived nutrients from the Kamchatka shelf in the Sea of Okhotsk into the eight major river systems that run off the middle range of mountains that divide Kamchatka in half.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1260934.JPG
  • Aerial photo showing a wate- filled cone of one of the three volcanoes, quiet now, but once formed Easter Island half a million years ago.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1493976.JPG
  • Aerial photo showing the braided river ecosystem for salmon spawning.<br />
<br />
When salmon die they fertilize the entire Pacific Rim. Warm waters from volcanic systems within with the coldest sea in the Pacific Rim create an ideal, nutrient-rich environment. And the river systems—some of the last braided streams on Earth that have not yet been constrained by agriculture—are vital habitat for salmon.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1260978.JPG
  • A river ecosystem for salmon spawning is braided and full of nutrients as it meanders through the tundra.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1260948.JPG
  • Father and son play
    RANDY OLSON_MM6541_663040-2.jpg
  • A split-level view shows the mountainous terrain of the island and  the coral r eef underneath the bay waters.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6541_663049-1.jpg
  • A nude man in a lake tosses a fresh-killed duck ashore.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_663866.jpg
  • A man embraces an arctic bath on  Siberia's Putorana Plateau.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_663875.jpg
  • Restored moai stand watch at Ahu Tongariki. RANDY OLSON Photographer photographs the mysterious statues for a National Geographic assignment on Easter Island.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8059_1493967-2.JPG
  • Floating islands of bouyant peat carry grasses, sedges, and bald cypress trees in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in southern Georgia.<br />
A mysterious aura surrounds the Okefenokee, wilderness of a boggy, unstable land commonly known as “Land of the Trembling Earth.” More accurately translated, “Okefenokee” means “waters shaking” in Hitchiti, an extinct dialect in the Muskogean language family spoken in the Southeast by indigenous people related to Creeks and Seminoles.<br />
<br />
The name refers to the gas that forms as submerged vegetation decomposes and bubbles up from the bottom of the swamp. Plants begin growing and clump together to form spongy little islands.
    MELISSA FARLOW_05842_470843.JPG
  • A boat cuts through reflections of clouds in the placid waters of the St. Mary’s River in Southern Georgia. The St. Mary’s forms a division between Florida and Georgia as it flows east to the Atlantic Ocean out of the Okefenokee Swamp.
    MELISSA FARLOW_05842_110252.JPG
  • Blazing sunset leaves in shadow the famous gap in Kiger Gorge, atop Oregon's Steens Mountain. Steen's Mountain Wilderness is “the largest fault-block mountain in the northern Great Basin.”  The aerial view shows a forty mile long escarpment in southeastern Oregon has a notch cut out of the top and drops abruptly to the dry Alvord Desert, 5,500 feet below.<br />
Bulldozing down to basalt, Ice Age glaciers carved our huge gorges out of the Great Basin's largest fault block mountain. Beyond, Steens's east face plummets a vertical mile.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-56.JPG
  • Clouds fill depressions through the mountainous area of Northern California after a passing storm.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-54.JPG
  • A lone cyclist crosses the maritime chaparral of Fort Ord National Monument, once a bustling Army post on central California's Monterey Peninsula and now a Bureau of Land Management-run reserve for recreation and scarce native habitats. The coastal gem has 86 miles of trails to ride a bike or horse or hike through diverse habitats.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-51.JPG
  • Castleton Rock is a 400-foot Wingate Sandstone tower standing on a 1,000 foot Moenkopi-Chinle cone above the northeastern border of Castle Valley, Utah. It is a world-renown desert rock formation that has numerous climbing routes and is located outside of Moab.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-34.JPG
  • Gossamer blossoms of pink farewell-to-spring flutter on slopes of the Carrizo Plain National Monument where wildflowers flourish amid remnants of California’s original grasslands.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705729-5.JPG
  • Harsh winds blow snow across the craggy peaks of the South Chilkat Mountains, illuminating intense, orange colors of a winter sunset.<br />
Photographed from the air, the Coastal Range is directly across the Lynn Canal and the Juneau Icefield in southeast Alaska.
    MM7258_20060310_15159.tif
  • Bachelors in a small mountain village don festive costumes and parade house to house to visit neighbors. They gather around the kitchen table to share food, drink and friends' news during the annual, traditional celebration of Carnival that welcomes spring after a long winter. Traditions are important throughout villages in the Slovian Alps.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7139_1024023-2.TIF
  • Tributary of the Unuk River in the Tongass National Forest.
    MELISSA FARLOW_RF4115_1114669.jpg
  • Friends on the beach at Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5959_1376340.jpg
  • A boat motors past Stiltsville: abandoned homes on stilts.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5959_1376333.jpg
  • Walking in Lummus Park along Ocean Drive in South Beach.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5959_1376315.jpg
  • An Afro-Cuban dance teacher shows dance moves of sea goddess Yemaya.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5959_1312319.jpg
  • A father and son skip rocks along Lake Michigan south of the Loop.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5887_1345830.jpg
  • The horse herd grazes in the last hours of light, and a mustang mare locates and nuzzles her foal.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7517_1222879.jpg
  • Two gray stallions put their heads together to smell a territorial marking. Although it may look friendly, the mustangs are exhibiting behavior typical in a wild horse herd when studs are vying for dominance. At this point, they may fight or walk away to battle another time.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7517_1222872.TIF
  • A herd of mustangs move across the grasslands as a summer storm builds over the high plains. It is believed that over two million wild horses roamed the largely unfenced American West in the 1900s.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7517_1222811.jpg
  • A stallion nips at at another stud as they fight for dominance in a wild horse herd. Dust rises as the pair clash in the dry summer months in the West.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7517_1222803.jpg
  • The Taku winds blow icy ridges that  overlook the Inside Passage. Stillness is only broken by the sound of skiers breaking through crusty snow to view the sunset view on top of Douglas Island nearby Juneau.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7258_1086960.jpg
  • Living on a float house in a quiet bay, a woman drives a boat to Thorne Bay for supplies and to take her children to school on Prince of Wales Island.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7258_1075129.TIF
  • A common sunstar fish or Crossaster papposus is exposed at low tide in a rich intertidal zone on Moser Island in Alaska's Southeast. It normally has nine or ten arms but can have many more. They have a piny texture and pray on other sea stars, sea urchins, snails, cucumbers and sea anemones.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7258_1075119.TIF
  • A humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) surfaces and dives into Stephens Passage. Studies how the humpback from Southeast Alaska travels mostly to Hawaii to breed and returns in the summer to the cold Alaskan waters.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7258_1075105.TIF
  • Sunrise gives a warm glow to morning mist rising over Control Lake framed by the forest on Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7258_1075087.jpg
  • Ice-covered peaks of South Chilkat Mountains appear to have frosting on their tops from melting snow. Aerial photos is made when winds lay near sunset.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7258_1075067.TIF
  • Frosty morning snow on a canoe and trees surrounding a small lake near Mendenhall Glacier.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7258_1075064.TIF
  • Fog drifts over a secluded estuary and the Thorne River on Prince of Wales Island seen from the air in Southeast Alaska. The main island includes hundreds of adjacent smaller islands—a total of more than 2,600 square miles with 990 miles of coastline and countless bays coves, inlets, and points.<br />
Fjords, steep-sided mountains, and dense forests characterize the island. Extensive tracts of limestone include karst features.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7258_1075048.TIF
  • Fog-draped forest wilderness and rugged mountains are typical in Southeast Alaska where the 17 million acre Tongass National Forest receives an average of 200 inches of precipitation a year.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7258_1075040.jpg
  • Rays of sunlight pierce the clouds hanging over Sitka Sound and Baranof Island. Southeast Alaska receives about 200 inches of rain a year creating its moody ambiance.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7258_1073532.TIF
  • Bird's-eye view of a vineyard and train tracks running through the bustling city of Balzano in the South Tyrol province of northern Italy. Set in a valley amid steep hills, it is a gateway to the Dolomites mountain range in the Italian Alps.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7139_1024118.jpg
  • Japanese tourists view the Matterhorn and pose for photos with the iconic St. Bernard dogs in the Alps. Around two million tourists visit annually to Switzerland's most popular destination nearby Zermatt.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7139_1024117.jpg
  • Morning fog rises over a summit cross on Zinalrothorn and other mountain peaks in the Alps surrounding the Matterhorn. Image is made from an early morning helicopter flight.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7139_1024112.TIF
  • Morning fog rises from craggy mountain peaks in the Alps surrounding the Matterhorn. The Alps range formed when two tectonic plates of Africa dn Eurasia slowly collided millions of years ago creating some of highest peaks in Europe.<br />
Rugged Zinalrothorn and Weisshorn in the background.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7139_1024111.TIF
  • A summit cross depicts a Christian crucifix standing high on a peak in the Dolomite Mountains. The cross is seen from an aerial flight.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7139_1024104.TIF
  • An evening view of the snow-covered resort town of Sestriere, Italy. Olympic alpine skiing competition was held on the slopes in the Alps during the 2006 competition and now draws tourists to the quiet mountain region.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7139_1024034.jpg
  • Dawn over the Buttes of the Cross and their shadows on rock cliffs.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7062_960904.jpg
  • Clear Pacific Ocean waters meeting a mountainous coastline.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7061_760124.jpg
  • Twilight view of Shi Shi beach and it's sea stacks.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7061_760070.jpg
  • Twilight view of Olympic mountains and evergreens in snowy landscape.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7061_760069.jpg
  • A beach with large tree-capped sea stacks and gentle surf.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7061_760065.jpg
  • Low tide on a beach with sea stacks in Olympic National Park.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7061_760051.jpg
  • Water rushing over a small fall on the Sol Duc River.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7061_759460.jpg
  • Hobet 21 mountain top removal coal mine seen from the air, grows larger and approaches a family home. Mines run 24 hours a day, seven days a week creating coal dust impossible to keep out of houses.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023747.jpg
  • After coal is extracted at a mountaintop removal mine site, a land reclamation project begins by spraying hydroseed on steep rocky slopes where little can grow. Mines are legally required to restore the land to its “approximate original contour.”<br />
Roughly 1.2 million acres, including 500 mountains, have been flattened by mountaintop removal coal mining in the central Appalachian region, and only a fraction of that land has been reclaimed for so-called beneficial economic uses, according to research by environmental groups.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023668.jpg
  • Morning fog fills a valley below a coal mining site in Appalachia.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023662.jpg
  • Streams are polluted with coal sludge from a mining accident that occurred when the bottom of a coal slurry impoundment in Martin County, Kentucky broke into an abandoned underground mine in October 2000. An estimated 306 million gallons of oozing black waste containing arsenic and mercury killed everything in a creek and measured five feet deep covering nearby yards and surrounding some homes. Drinking water was contaminated for 27,000 residents as tributaries carried it to the Big Sandy and Ohio Rivers. It is considered one of the worst environmental disasters in the southeastern United States and although largely cleaned up, water quality issues exist and residents still find sludge and slurry in surface water.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6773_1023642.jpg
  • A dirt road cuts through a sagebrush sea to dark, cloudy skies of a distant, looming, rain storm. Sagebrush ecosystems cover vast stretches of western North America creating rangeland habitat for animals such as pronghorn antelope, black-tailed jackrabbits and sage-grouse.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705738.jpg
  • Blue ghostly, silhouetted mountains disappear into the distance of the vast and desolate million-acre wilderness of Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument in Arizona.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705735.jpg
  • Wild stallions square off at a watering hole as other horses drink. Horses come to drink in a hierarchy, so these two mustangs are competing for dominance as water becomes more scarce for wildlife.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_705725.jpg
  • Aerial view.  Dusted in snow, a section of the 12-mile ridge line of the Grand Wash Cliffs glows at twilight. Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument marks a transition zone between the Colorado Plateau and Basin and Range Provinces. The 37,030-acre protected wilderness region includes rugged canyons, scenic escarpments, and colorful orange, sandstone buttes in northern Arizona.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6659_680964.jpg
  • Dogs swim and retrieve balls in a designated area in Prospect Park's Dog Beach. Brooklyn, NY locals use the dog-friendly acres of green space for special off-leash hours at the Long Meadow, Nethermead, Peninsula Meadow and, during those hours, even a place to swim.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6560_968599.jpg
  • Late day sun lights a meadow in Yosemite National Park. Glaciers carved the Sierra Nevada mountains and creating walls that frame a flat valley floor.  Trees and grasses provide a scenic setting in late fall before the first snows.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6560_968593.jpg
  • Aerial  view of the Maze District where scenic rock formations of the remote terrain in Canyonlands National Park. 337,598 acres of colorful canyons, mesas, buttes, fins, arches, and spires are in the heart of southeast Utah's high desert. Water and gravity have been the prime architects of this land, sculpting layers of rock into the rugged landscape
    MELISSA FARLOW_06103_495891.jpg
  • A car rounds a curve along a scenic section of the Pan American highway north of Oaxaca in Mexico.<br />
The Pan-American Highway is a network of road that passes through the America's many diverse climates and ecological types – ranging from dense jungles to arid deserts.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_1187636.jpg
  • Young boy gallops at full speed riding bare back on a horse leaving clouds of dust in the barren, high-mountain Peruvian desert near Chauchilla.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_1187591.jpg
  • People play in the surf along the beach during soft summer light in La Serena, Chile's premier beach resort. La Serena enjoys a transitional climate between the arid northern desert of the Atacama and the pleasant Mediterranean climate of the central coast.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_1187584.jpg
  • Vicunas live near the arid Atacama Desert in Reserva Nacional Salinas y Aguada Blanca. They survive eating nutrient-poor, tough, bunch grasses. Highly valued for their wool, vicunas are protected by law. The vicuna is the national animal of Peru and appears on the Peruvian coat of arms.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_1187564.jpg
  • A crocodile in the Omo River.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7661_1306568.TIF
  • Kara tribesmen with bows and arrows on the Omo River.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7661_1306496.JPG
  • A Kara tribe elder peers out over the Omo River at his goats feeding on the sorghum stalks after a harvest.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7661_1283974.TIF
  • A brown bear fishing for salmon in icy waters of Kuril Lake. Kamchatka has the highest density of brown bears, also known as grizzly bears, in the world. There are almost 15,000 on the Russian peninsula.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1260960.TIF
  • Workers pull a net with salmon at a fishing brigade on the Bolshaya River.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1260949.JPG
  • A worker catches salmon at a fish camp.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1260947.JPG
  • A fishing brigade on the Bolshaya River south of the town of Oktyabrski where men make a fish camp out of a beached, ocean-going vessel.  They are not fishing on this day because it allows time for the fish to spawn, and indigenous communities up river in Kamchatka can fish in the area along the Bolshaya River. <br />
<br />
Fishing brigades use tractors to tow one end of a net and then bring it around full circle in the river to capture the fish. A net is  dumped into small boats that have small nets laid in them. A crane picks up the small nets and dumps them into trucks that take the fish to the processing plants in Ust Bolsheretsk. If fishing was allowed every day in the mouths of these rivers just off the Kamchatka shelf, no salmon would get up river to spawn. There are two “passing days” each week when fishing is banned, so these fishermen hang out in their camp and do their laundry. Some fishermen come from as far as Ulan-Ude, which is on the border with Siberia. One of the fishermen in this photo is from PK, two are from Urilutsk, Siberia, and two are from Oktybrski.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1248226.TIF
  • The Vyvenka River loops through a floodplain in an oxbow curve in Kamchatka, a peninsula in far east Russia that is the size of California but only 130 kilometers of roads.  All roads are clustered around the capital, Petropavlovsk.  All other travel is by plane, MI-8 helicopter or something they call an ATV but we refer to them as a tank. Flying over the big empty landscape, the view is wetlands, tundra, braided streams, and meandering unconstrained rivers. Free of roads and dams, it is the perfect environment for salmon swimming upstream to spawn.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7593_1248217.TIF
  • Lake Embakaai mirrors clouds hanging above the Crater Highlands.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7314_985618.TIF
  • Wildebeests and wattled starlings begin their migration.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7314_985606.TIF
  • Aerial view of some of the 16,000 participants in the Ski Marathon as Nordic skiers trek across frozen upper Engadine valley. The winter event has been hosted since 1969 drawing athletes and tourists to mountain communities around Saint Moritz in the Alps.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7139_1024133.TIF
  • A farm worker drives his pickup truck into the field to herd cows to the barn for morning milking in the rural, northern Austria's Alpine region.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM7139_1021459.TIF
  • Eucalyptus tree at twilight.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7112_968673.JPG
  • A rain cell forming over a grassland dotted with termite mounds.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7112_763282.JPG
  • Raging muddy flood waters after an Australian rain storm.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7112_763248.JPG
  • An aerial view of the cloud-shrouded Caucasus mountains.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6879_708221.TIF
  • Suckermouth armored catfish lying on river bottom near a fisherman.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6570_706643.JPG
  • The moon rises over the Putorana Plateau.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673188.JPG
  • A wooden pathway leads to an almost ghostly line of fog above a lake.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673186.JPG
  • A man embraces an arctic bath on  Siberia's Putorana Plateau.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_663875.JPG
  • Aerial of Grand Prismatic Spring.
    RANDY OLSON_06103_495549.JPG
  • The Allegheny ant Monongahela Rivers converge at the Golden Triangle.
    RANDY OLSON_05837_470265.JPG
  • Brown bears fishing for salmon in Kuril Lake. Kurilskoe Lake Preserve is a world heritage site and had serious poaching. But now, two or three wardens are always out on enforcement and they pack out for a month at a time.  The official salary for wardens is $200 a month, but the WWF came in and supplemented salaries and bought them the equipment they need to do the job. WWF decided one of the gems of the reserve system that exists in all of Russia should be poaching free - and that also protects the brown bears.
    MM7593_20080813_06845.tif
  • Samoans make baskets of woven pandanus leaves.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6541_653554-7.jpg
  • Samoans in the vegetation they need to make baskets of woven pandanus leaves.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6541_653554-4.jpg
  • A child is covered in herbs as part of a coming of age ritual.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6541_663040-3.jpg
  • Aerial view of Ofu Island.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6541_663056.jpg
  • A split-level view of mountains and coral reef.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6541_663067.jpg
  • Samoan workers trudge through vegetation carrying machetes and bundles made of woven pandanus leaves.
    RANDY OLSON_MM6541_653554-1.jpg
  • A nude man in a lake tosses a fresh-killed duck ashore.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673219-6.jpg
  • A nude man in a lake tosses a fresh-killed duck ashore.
    RANDY OLSON_06396_673219-2.jpg
Next