Photographer Page

Dariustwin

Pearson had to crouch under a rock formation in Los Padres National Forest to create this trio of bright-eyed bats encircled by sprouting vegetation; the image combines three exposures.

A southern sea otter strikes a pose in San Simeon, California. Pearson says he painted this image as a tribute to the “adorable” marine mammal, nearly wiped out by the fur trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. Today conservation organizations estimate that around 3,000 of them remain in the wild.

A colorful widow spider creeps across Death Valley. “I wanted to use the salt flat’s naturally occurring weblike formations on the lowest point in North America,” says Pearson.

Tides and timing were critical for this seahorse image in San Diego. “A little after sunset during nautical twilight, you get ‘blue hour,’ and you only get about 15 minutes of perfect long-exposure light-painting conditions,” Pearson says.

For several years Pearson has tried to make a Spinosaurus as successful as this one from 2014, which appears to be walking on water in Ventura, California. “It was an amazing feeling to look at this on the back of the camera screen,” he says. “All the stars aligned.”

Pearson made this photo at a creek in California’s Big Sur and titled it “Luminous Tentacles.” Octopuses are challenging to depict, he says, “because of how many different appendages there are and getting all the proportions accurate.”

Pearson’s designs often exhibit a gestural quality featuring a frenzy of energetic lines. But he has also developed a series of spare, single-line light paintings, such as this heron reflected in a seasonal creek near his home.

Sometimes ideas come from unlikely places, such as this drainage pipe in California’s Los Padres National Forest. Pearson saw it while hiking, then returned that night to transform the graffitied, corrugated metal into a backdrop for a Triceratops.

A bee alights in the Beehives area of Nevada’s Valley of Fire State Park.

A butterfly brightens a spot near Pearson’s California home.