What if you made landscape images and put owls at their center, in fact, what if you let the owl, by its location, more or less determine the framing of the image? You’d be making landscape images, yes, but messy ones, ones that reflect more how nature really is rather than how it is usually depicted in photographs and paintings.

Last year, starting in late March, I began photographing a family of owls near my home, going out as many evenings a week as I could, making images as the chicks grew and flew and eventually, in mid-August, flew away.