Tim Shuff

● Giant gravel pit story

tim — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:16:48 +0000

“Cropland, aggregate, rail, water, wind. It’s hard to imagine a list more defining of the preoccupations of our times. But what happens when all those elements converge in one community, courtesy of one developer? Is it a bright vision of a sustainable future, or crass “rural blockbusting” set to devastate farmland and decimate a community? In Melancthon, the battle lines are drawn.”

This is the intro to my feature story in the Fall 2009 issue of In the Hills magazine. You can read it here.

● SARSCENE magazine article

tim — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:16:55 +0000

A former colleague of mine runs a cool course at Acadia University in which he trains outdoor guides by taking them into the woods and running live search and rescue scenarios with SAR technicians, helicopters and fixed wing aircraft from the Canadian military. I wrote a short article about it here in SARSCENE magazine.

• On the canine beat

tim — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 02:32:42 +0000

I never imagined that I would become a canine journalist, but I just finished writing an article about “how to run with your dog” for the May issue of Canadian Running magazine and that has led to two related assignments for Dogs in Canada.

Echoes of Marley & Me? I even have a baby on the way. I’ve been joking that my new specialty will be dogs and babies. But it is beginning to stop feeling like a joke.

• How to sell a magazine cover shot

tim — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 22:33:38 +0000

1. Get outdoor magazine story assignment.

2. Be the only person on the trip with a good camera.

3. Take 200 photos a day.

4. Know the art director.

Ok, so it wasn’t very difficult, but I did land my very first magazine cover photo in the latest issue of Kayak Angler magazine. The image in question is one of the 1,400+ photos I took during a week of kayak fishing in the Queen Charlotte Islands. Click here to read the story.

For more details about my ongoing travails to get my photographs published in the magazines that I edit (let alone elsewhere) read this.

Can I call myself a photographer yet?

• Definitions of environmental communication

tim — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:24:18 +0000

Clay Schoenfeld
“The roots of EC include nature writing, outdoor recreation and travel writing, science writing, public affairs reporting, and persuasion. The common denominators of the various forms of EC include a hard core of ecological content, a recognition of worldwide problems of crisis proportions, a value system, and a concern for private and public action.”—source

Mark Meisner
“In his textbook Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, Robert Cox provides a more formal definition that situates environmental communication as a form of symbolic action. In Cox’s words (p.12), environmental communication is “the pragmatic and constitutive vehicle for our understanding of the environment as well as our relationships to the natural world; it is the symbolic medium that we use in constructing environmental problems and negotiating society’s different responses to them.” By pragmatic Cox means the instrumental function of educating, alerting, persuading, mobilizing, solving, etc. By constitutive he means the creative function of helping to shape our perceptions of nature, environmental issues and ourselves.”—source

National Communication Association, Environmental Communication Division
“We believe all communication involves an environmental dimension, because symbolic and natural systems are mutually constituted. Humans are one part of the broader ecosystems and cultures we inhabit, both shaping and shaped by our corporeal, intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and physical alienation from and proximity to those spaces and communities.”—source

Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture
“…symbolic and natural systems are mutually constituted…”—source

• Now reading: Builders of the Pacific Coast

tim — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:24:50 +0000

I just bought this great book by Lloyd Kahn. The photos of coastal cabins are inspiring me for the upcoming “best towns, coastal real estate and dream homes” article I’m working on for Adventure Kayak. And also for the cabin I want to build someday.

• How and why I built this website

tim — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:13:44 +0000

Updating my old website was on my to-do list for about two years. It was great that my website was coming up number 1 when you Googled my name, but not so great that the first site anyone went to was two years out of date.

I decided it would be easier to keep the site current if I built it on a free web-based blogging platform. It should be easy, because the platform is made to be constantly updated.

So now I’ve built this site on WordPress, which is the same software I use for my Bruce Trail blog. There are still a few annoying glitches to be worked out, stories to add to my portfolio, updated text to write for my bio page, and more. The good thing is, it should all be a lot easier to do than ever before. After I sign off here, I’ll point my timshuff.com domain name to this new site. My old site will be no more. And I’ll cross my fingers and hope this new, up-to-date site gets picked up by Google as well as my old one did.