Doug Plummer: The Milestone Years

1955 Born in Chambersburg, PA, the county seat in a rural, Central Pennsylvania county. Famous for being torched in 1863 by General Lee on his way to Gettysburg.

1961 First camera, a Kodak Brownie. Promptly shot 3 rolls of the neighbors planting a tree. My dad showed me how to develop and print the pictures in our home darkroom.

1970 First total solar eclipse.

1972 First publication in a national magazine, Smithsonian. Of an eclipse.

1973 Won a national Fuji Film contest. Used the proceeds to view an eclipse in Africa.

1973 Attended Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio. Did my best to become a hippie. But I hated rock and roll, I was terrified of drugs, and I had no idea how to get laid.

1976 Moved to Idaho and the Sun Valley Center for the Arts for their amazing photography program run by Peter de Lory. Workshops with Henry Wessel, Nathan Lyons, Frederick Sommers, among others. These are the influences that still drive me.

1978-1980 Finally graduated from college from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, a kinder, gentler hippie school. Finally got a girlfriend.

1983 First photo assisting job, with Tim Fuller in Tucson, Arizona. First time it dawned on me that you could be a photographer without waiting tables.

1985 Summer in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a field grunt on a shorebird research project. Between 1980 and 1985 my girlfriend and I were ornithological research assistants at Pt. Reyes Bird Observatory, Long Pt. Bird Observatory, and on projects in Arizona, Michigan, northern Ontario and Alaska.

1985 Moved to Seattle to be a freelance photographer's assistant and, eventually, a full-time professional photographer.

1988 First contra dance camp. Wearing a Camp Wannadance t-shirt, I could finally get people to dance with me at the local dances.

1991 Fifth solar eclipse.

1992 First Communications Arts award.

1993 Married Robin Shapiro. Best thing that ever happened to me, and still my proudest achievement.

1994 Joined Photonica, a Japanese stock photo agency that had just opened up a New York office. Quickly became their largest American contributor. This was an era when you could shoot your life as it went by and you could make a living at it. It didn't last long, but these were my highest grossing years as a photographer.

1996 Reached 500 birds on my North American list.

1998-2002 Frequent travels to Ireland.

2002 My New York gallery exhibit debut ("Mystical Panoramics from Around the World") at the Edward Carter Gallery, New York. Unfortunate timing however, as the show opened 4 months after 9/11.

2003 Lucie Award for "Fine Art Photographer of the Year/Landscape".

2005 First assignment for North Charles Street Design Organization, the start of my college admissions marketing sub-career.

2008 Took a 10 day Platypus Workshop video journalism bootcamp in New Orleans. Became smitten with the storytelling possibilities of video.

2010 Took up the piano, at age 55. My era as an “adult-onset musician” began. In the years ahead I would add guitar, bouzouki and mandolin.

2011 Self published the 2012 Contradance Calendar, my photographs of contra dancing from all across the US.

2012 I've photographed and produced videos for 23 colleges now, including University of Chicago, Williams College, Stanford University, St. John's College, and a lot more.

2013 Played piano for my first contra dance.

2014 Elected to the governing board of the Country Dance and Song Society, a support organiztion for over 300 affiliate groups that program participatory music and dance.

2014 Began shooting for my feature length documentary film, Take Hands, about a dance organizer in Coos Bay, OR who wants to bring the whole town to the dance.

2020 We all remember what that year was like. I was surprised that I could be satisfied with a small life in my neighborhood, watching birds, playing music, and deepening our marriage. I finally called myself “retired,” as if that would change anything I was doing already.

2021 Take Hands premieres at the Northwest Folklife Festival. It would have a film festival tour (2022 at Friday Harbor Film Festival) and it's now available for free on YouTube.

Present day. I still photograph every day. I play music. I bird. I volunteer my photography skills for organizations that I want to support (like the Fiddle Tunes week at Centrum), but I rarely make it a transaction anymore. I'm deeply engaged as a music session leader, a concert host, and overall organizer and supporter of all that is near and dear to the life I want to lead. phone: 206.300.3543 location: Seattle, Washington 2doug@dougplummer.com