Bio

The world of photography and the world of the natural wonders of the Sierra Nevada opened to Don Jacobson simultaneously. The photographs he took with his little Kodak Brownie were woefully inadequate to express the grandeur of the Range of Light. Within a week of his first backpack trip into the high country, he bought his first SLR, a Pentax Spotmatic and began to take photography classes. His degree is in electrical engineering and he worked in that field for three years. Working for the defense industry became more of a contradiction with his political views initiating a search for a desperately needed a creative outlet. For the next twenty-eight years he worked as a glassblower. His work was shown in galleries across the United States, and the Corning Museum included a piece of his in their 1986 collection of 200 international glassblowers. Although glassblowing was his "day job*," he continued to practice the art of photography, studying photography with Edmund Teske at UCLA for a year. The two different mediums, are connected by light. The magic of glass is in its ability to transmit and reflect light while photography is the capturing of light. During the years he lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1973 through 1976, he amassed 135 images of owner decorated vehicles. He is currently a member of the Portland Photographers Forum and the Interim Group, a critique group originally formed by the influential photographer Minor White. His love of taking photographs of our beautiful native wildflowers contributed to his interest in botany. He led trips for the California Native Plant Society, the Native Plant Society of Oregon, Bark, Oregon Wild (formerly ONRC) and Portland Audubon. For sixteen seasons, he was a naturalist/guide for the Middle Mountain Foundation, leading hikes in the Sutter Buttes of the Sacramento Valley in California. "Beauty of the West," a book of his photographs was published in 2007, "Owner Decorated Vehicles" in 2009, "Alaska!" in 2010, "An Intimate View of Japan" in 2011, "Pacific Northwest Architecture - A Photo Essay" in 2012 and "A Landscape Transformed" in 2017. His photographs have won numerous awards including best Urban Landscape Photographer 2015 and many 1st place awards. Issue #123 of Lenswork magazine published 46 images from the series "A Landscape Transformed" including the cover. The Sierra Club Engagement Calendar published one of his photographs in 2021 and 2023. The Portland Japanese Garden's 2022 calendar will feature his photograph on the cover and the 2023calendar will also feature two of his photographs. B&W magazine and All About Photos magazine have published multiple portfolios of his work.