Ph.D. physicist Elliot McGucken's love for epic mythology pervades his photography, and though he left academia to pursue fine art photography, his greater odyssey retains its course--to serve with truth, beauty, and light. His award-winning work oft celebrates Nature's Epic, Homeric scenery, and he oft favors panoramic aspect ratios which best capture natural beauty's expansive grandeur.

As a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps the photographer's most accurate biography--that which best captures the story arc of their life--is their ever-evolving body of photographic art. Dr. E first picked up a Pentax 35mm film camera in his home town of Akron, Ohio, and found himself drawn to photographing the majestic vistas of Virginia Kendall Park and the Cuyahoga Valley National Parks system, where the glaciers had carved magnificent rock sculptures. His father, a conservationist and professor who had penned books and articles supporting the cleanup of the Great Lakes, imbued him with a love of the great outdoors, taking him and his sister on hikes every weekend, oft carrying them both up the bigger hills. His mother, who had studied art and grown up painting, would paint large, abstract, impressionistic landscapes, thusly introducing the sight of canvases on easels and the magical scent of oils and turpentine into Dr. E's earliest memories. As both his parents were professors, family vacations took him to every art museum up and down the East Coast, including NY's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where his parents had met.