New eBook Coming Soon

Jan 15

Introducing The Nature of Place

The Circle of Light is excited to announce our first collaborative project, The Nature of Place: Personal Narratives in Landscape Photography. The Nature of Place is a PDF ebook, which we plan to release around the end of April 2026. If you would like to be notified about its release, you can sign up for our mailing list here. We will be launching the ebook with a pre-order special starting in early spring, with introductory pricing that will be offered to our subscribers for a limited time.

Our Mission and The Nature of Place

We created the Circle of Light to elevate the art of nature photography by thoughtfully exploring beyond the conventional boundaries of our craft, with the goal of fostering a broader range of personal expression and creative flourishing. When discussing ideas for our first project with this mission in mind, the centrality of place and the importance of deeply connecting with the landscape within our individual photographic practices surfaced as the dominant thread in our conversations. We followed this thread, placing these ideas at the center of this project.

The Nature of Place starts with each of us individually exploring and examining the role of place and connection in the creative process and expands into an extended dialogue between the six of us. Because conversation about our experiences, practices, reflections, and challenges brought us together as a group, we wanted to put dialogue at the center of our first project, as well.

The Six Personal Narratives

The Nature of Place ebook is structured around one in-depth essay from each of us, with each of these essays centered around our personal narrative about how we connect with the places we photograph. The personal narratives are quite diverse in terms of approach, reflecting six different interpretations of the starting thread and our unique ways of practicing the craft of photography, ranging from deeply personal to philosophical to practical. From each lead essay, the ebook evolves into a conversation between the six of us to further examine the relationship between artistic vision, the creative process, our relationships to specific places, and how these experiences and lessons create opportunities for introspection and the unfolding of self.

The six lead essays explore the following topics:

Intuition in the Landscape: Listening with Your Eyes by Charlotte Gibb
On Landscape Literacy and Connecting Self with Place by Michele Sons
Igniting the Creative Spark: Find What Makes You Come Alive by Claudia Welsh
The Ponderosa in the Front Yard: Practices that Lead to Deeper Connections and Seeing More in the Landscape by Sarah Marino
Seeing With: Finding Home in a More-Than-Human World by Anna Morgan
Letting Go to Discover: The Journey to an Authentic Creative Self by Jennifer Renwick

While our intended audience for The Nature of Place is photographers, any creative person turning to the natural world for inspiration will benefit from our discussions.

An Invitation to the Reader

From each of the lead essays, we move into a flowing, dynamic dialogue in response to our colleague’s offerings, covering topics including identity, authenticity, seeing, curiosity, being present, belonging, attention, and much more. Together, the essays and the dialogues serve as an invitation for the reader to reflect on and possibly learn from our practices in terms of seeing the landscape, feeling it more deeply, and connecting more fully with the places we each choose to explore and photograph.

The Nature of Place is not a prescriptive guide on how to practice landscape photography. Instead, it is a collection of our personal reflections that are intended to prompt the reader to consider, question, and extend our dialogue through introspection and creative action. By offering our personal narratives on the meaning of connecting to place as a vital part of our creative practices, we are hoping readers will feel inspired to develop and share their own personal narratives around these threads, thus extending and deepening the conversation.

Subscribe to Stay Informed About The Nature of Place

If you would like to be notified when we release The Nature of Place, you can sign up to our mailing list here.

Sarah Marino

Sarah Marino is a nature photographer, photography educator, nature enthusiast, and writer based in rural southwestern Colorado. In addition to photographing grand landscapes, Sarah is best known for her quiet photographs of smaller subjects including intimate landscapes, abstract renditions of natural subjects, and creative portraits of plants and flowers.