02 — About

Half a century.One landscape.

— Robert Castellino, Boulder · CO · est. 1984

It started on a cold winter day in Oregon, in 1985. Robert was VP of Operations and Marketing at Willamette Pass Ski Area; the camera came out, and the work that followed never stopped.

In 1991 he attended his first photographic workshop, with the renowned National Geographicstaff photographer Sam Abell — a turning point in the way he sees and composes. He has also been a long student of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, a discipline of attention that has shaped the practice since.

Now based in Lafayette, Colorado, Robert photographs the Rocky Mountains, the desert Southwest, the national parks, oceans and islands, and the quieter subjects close to home. He has self-published greeting cards, calendars, books, and fine art print exhibits, including the Collectors Edition of Colorado: Life & Light on the Land.

One goal, unchanged from the first winter morning: to connect people with nature and life through fine art photography, by making exceptional and extraordinary images.

— On the work

What others have said.

A few things others have said about the work, over the years — gathered, with permission, from notes and conversations.

“His landscapes are made by waiting, and you can feel the years in them. There is no hurry in any frame I have ever seen, and after a while no hurry, you come to feel, anywhere in the country he has been photographing.”

A curator

“The light is doing the work, and the photographer is doing his — which is to say, the hardest work, the work of not getting in the way.”

A critic

“I have lived with one of his prints for years now. It is the photograph that taught me what stillness looks like, and it is the photograph I look at on the mornings when I have forgotten.”

A collector

— On location, 2019 — 2024

Behind the camera.

Zion National Park, Primus AW at sunset — In the field

Robert photographing Zion Canyon at sunset — At work, on location

Robert Castellino at Jenny Lake, Wyoming — Jenny Lake, Wyoming

— In the words of others

A working reputation.

Quieter notes — from people who have lived with the prints, or walked with the camera, long enough to have something to say.

“He does not chase the light. He waits for it, which is a much harder thing, and a much rarer one.”

A fellow photographer

“A student asked, with real puzzlement, why a photograph could be that quiet and still feel that necessary. I am still, years later, answering the same question.”

A photography teacher

“His work is patient in the moral sense of the word. The patience is not a method. It is a position.”

A writer on photography

“I went out with him three mornings in a row. On the first two we made no photographs. On the third we made one. He talked about all three mornings as if they were the same morning, and after a while I understood that, for him, they were.”

A working photographer

“The work earns a quieter kind of attention than most landscape work asks for — and pays it back, slowly, on the wall.”

A long-time collector

“The clients who buy one of his prints tend, in my experience, to come back for a second within a year. The first teaches them something they did not know they wanted to learn. The second is them coming back for the rest of the lesson.”

A framer