More about Paul Horsted...possibly more than you want to know.

My photography experience dates back to high school days in Brandon, South Dakota, long, long ago. My first camera was an old Voightlander model Dad had purchased 20 years earlier while stationed with the U.S. Army in Germany. The camera required something called “film”, which had to be periodically re-loaded into the camera (usually while the winning touchdown was being scored.) The camera did not require flash cards, imaging sensors, cables, CD’s, LCD’s, Photoshop, WiFi networks, or even a battery. Just a good eye and a ready shutter finger.

Having moved to digital photography years ago, I don't miss those days, however. Sure there are times I still reminisce about spending half the day in a stuffy darkroom to produce just one good print a client could then accidentally use as a coffee coaster, but time and technology march on. Today we can crank out 25 coffee coasters, er, photos, in no time!

Seriously, today’s computerized tools really do give a photographer much greater flexibility and capability to produce images and art that couldn’t be dreamed of back in the Age of Film, and I wouldn't go back for anything. (Except possibly to get some of my hair back.)

And if you’ve scrolled this far, you may like to know I've been working as an independent freelance photographer for the past 20 years, with numerous national credits in magazines, books and corporate advertising. Way back when, my work was published at times in LIFE, National Geographic, USA Today, Reader's Digest, Smithsonian, and many other publications. Nowadays I work mostly on those subjects that interest me, and with my wife (and book designer) Camille Riner publish books on the beauty and history of the Black Hills, Dakotas, and beyond. I also enjoy giving programs for conventions, bus tours, and others who find their way out here to the Wild West. Sample of my typical program here.

Before I began working independently, I was a newspaper photographer (Brandon Valley, S.D. Reporter, and Sioux Falls, S.D. Argus Leader), where I photographed car wrecks, blizzards, floods, droughts, politics and other disasters the editor ordered me to shoot. But I also got to meet and photograph many great people of this great state of South Dakota through the newspaper biz. Later, I was the chief photographer at South Dakota Tourism, where I traveled the highways and byways of the state, and met and photographed the REST of the people in the state. I learned about a place called “The Black Hills”, little knowing it would one day be where I would choose to make my home.

I'm a 1987 graduate of South Dakota State University in Brookings. While at SDSU, I was the photography editor of the campus yearbook, The Jack Rabbit. “State” had a slogan which said, “You can go anywhere from here”, and my experiences there did indeed help get me wherever I am today. Why they chose me a few years ago to be in one of their TV commercials featuring graduates such as our Governor and rocket scientists and the like, I’ll never understand. But I am grateful for the experience.

Back to the present: In addition to photography, Camille and I operate Dakota Photographic LLC (and its publishing imprint, Golden Valley Press), a design, art and book publishing company in the woods north of Custer, South Dakota. In addition to ongoing photography of the landscape here, I continue my research on early explorers, pioneering photographers, and the history of this fascinating and beautiful corner of the world.

If this tongue-in-cheek biography has not satisfied your curiosity, please send me an email with your questions, feedback, comments, suggestions, problems, or answers. Especially answers.
P.H.