Ben Horton: Photos from the Edge

At 25, photographer Ben Horton is still near the beginning of his career. But what a career: He’s already documented the natural world from tropical islands to the Arctic wilderness, from mountaintops to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Horton’s gift for composition and passion for recording the effects of humans on the planet have made him one of his generation’s most notable conservation photographers, and the first-ever recipient of the National Geographic Young Explorers Grant.

While Horton depends on his unique vision to capture compelling imagery, he relies on his Macs and the newest version of Aperture to catalog, process, and present his photographs to clients and the public.

When the environment permits, Horton brings along his 15-inch MacBook Pro to process his work, transferring his files to a 24-inch iMac once he returns home. “With my Macs and Apple software, I can pay attention to the work, rather than trying to get the computer to work,” he says.

Horton is a Mac fan today, but he started out on a Windows-based PC. Five years ago, he switched to a 17-inch PowerBook because he found the instability of his Windows machines unsuitable for his work. “They kept crashing. Everything was slow,” he says. “They froze up, regardless of how much memory I installed, or whether I was using a desktop or laptop.”

But these days, he says, “I never have any problems. With Macs, when you want to do something, you do it—and everything happens just the way you expect it to.”

Polar Photographer

By the time he was 17, Horton had already traveled around the world. Rather than attend college—or even complete high school—he decided to jump directly into his chosen calling. Since then, Horton has developed both his craft and his endurance by participating in several major professional expeditions. Back home in Colorado, he’s also developed a reputation as a fashion and product photographer for such clients as Teva sandals, Premier Bride magazine, and even National Geographic.

Horton’s photos of shark poaching around Costa Rica’s Cocos Island recently drew the attention of Will Steger. The famed polar explorer invited Horton to accompany him on a 1,400-mile, two-month dogsled expedition across the northernmost part of the Canadian Arctic, just west of Greenland. The purpose of the trip: to chronicle the shrinking glaciers, endangered polar bear population, and other effects of global warming on Ellesmere Island.

In an environment of bleak, snow-covered landscapes, temperatures that rarely rose above
-30°C, and limited carrying space, it was out of the question to bring along a laptop to Ellesmere Island. Instead, Horton stored his images—shot with a Canon EOS-1D Mark III SLR—directly on CF drives, downloading his RAW files later to his laptop and backing them up on a portable LaCie Rugged 250GB drive. Once he returned to Colorado, Horton transferred the files to his 24-inch iMac connected to an external 1TB Western Digital drive, formatted with his internal drive as a RAID array.

Aperture 2 for Image Management

To process his shots, Horton uses Apple’s Aperture 2 image processing program, supplemented by Adobe Photoshop to remove large image imperfections. For Horton, both applications are tools for perfecting rather than manipulating photos. Extensive image alteration is not part of his repertoire; the native shot, he believes, must stand on its own.

“I use Photoshop only to remove dust specks,” he says. “I don’t think it’s ethical to call it photography if you clone the image and cut-and-paste parts. When you do that after the fact, it’s design, not photography.”

A user of the original version of Aperture, Horton appreciates the enhancements to the software’s latest iteration. “In Aperture 2, things are just quicker to find than in the previous version,” he says. “Importing photographs and then finding them later is a much more intuitive task. And the new version is faster, allowing me to scan through my images more quickly.”

Hammerheads gather near Cocos Island.

The layout has also been dramatically improved, he observes: “The whole app feels right—it’s easy to maneuver and all the editing tools are in one place. I don’t like to spend a lot of time figuring out how to use a program, and with Aperture, you don’t have to. It’s right there.”