Purchasing Prints

Purchasing the photography showcased here is as easy as one, two, three:

  1. Decide which prints you want and e-mail me at

    photography@ecopunk.info

    with the titles, sizes, and quantities you desire. Also include your full shipping address. Exact pricing will depend upon the details of the order; print prices for some common sizes are provided below.

    Longest Dimension (Inches) Price (USD)
    3" × 5"$20
    5" × 7"$30
    8" × 10"$50
    12" × 8"$60
    11" × 14"$90
    16" × 24"$180
    20" × 30"$240

    Note that not all photographs are available as prints, so be sure to check the details first!

  2. I'll e-mail you back to let you know the order total, including shipping & handling.

  3. You send me the payment and I'll send you a second e-mail letting you know when your order has shipped. Unless otherwise agreed upon, payment is by Paypal, payable to photography@ecopunk.info.

Print Details

All photographs are printed on acid-free fine art paper and include the title and artist's signature on the back. Stretched canvas prints are also available for an additional charge. Note that while my goal is to produce prints that match what you see here as closely as possible, exact color matching is not always impossible.


Restrictions of Use

All of my non-commissioned work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. What this means is that you are free to display my prints publicly (such as in a business or home), give them to your friends, or use them as a basis for your own art projects. However, there are some important restrictions:

  1. You must provide me with credit for my work (whether by itself or as part of a derivative work) when displaying it publicly using both my name (Nathan Acks) and (if displayed online) a link to this photoblog (http://ecopunk.info/photography/).

  2. You cannot sell my work (or any derivative of it) for profit, or use it for any commercial or promotional purposes (this includes charging admission to view it or using it as part of an ad-supported work such as a magazine article).

  3. You must license any derivative works under a similar license.

Any (or all) of these restrictions can be waived, though doing so may incur additional expenses. Please contact me for details.

Why do I use a Creative Commons license? Because I understand that my work is neither the beginning nor the end of the creative process.

About the Artist

Nathan Acks

I'm a man who wears many hats: photographer, writer, mathematician, computer geek, aspiring jack-of-all-trades. The common thread that runs through these is the concept of individual and community self-determination and the emerging "Age of Amateurs", a phenomenon I believe has the potential to become a radically democratizing force within our society. It is a process that takes a myriad of forms, from the free software movement and do-it-yourself (DIY) philosophy to mashup music and community gardening. Ultimately though, it begins with how we choose to live our lives.


About EcoPunk Photography & Design

EcoPunk Photography & Design is my online showcase. Every day I'll post a new work from my collection, each one more recent than the last. There may be a few gaps if I get busy with other projects but I promise they'll be infrequent. All of the photographs showcased here are available as high quality prints. I also have a Flickr gallery for those interested in my less formal work.

It's important to have your computer monitor as well calibrated as possible when viewing digital photography. Photo Friday's page on the subject will help you get started. For the absolute best results, I recommend using a color managed browser such as Mozilla Firefox or Apple's Safari.

All content on EcoPunk Photography & Design was created by Nathan Acks and is covered under a Creative Commons license, except for the Laughing Squid "Powered By" button and the naturalist prints used in the background, originals of which can be found on the Wikimedia Commons.

Why I Use the Creative Commons

All of the photographs on EcoPunk Photography & Design and my Flickr account are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Unlike ordinary copyright, this means that anyone is free to share my work or use it as the basis for their own art.

Why would anyone give away that much control? And more importantly, how can I expect to ever make money off of my art?

To answer the second question first, one right I have retained is to sell prints of my work — no one else may sell my work (or works based upon my own) for profit without my explicit permission. Nor is anyone allowed to pass off my work as their own — I expect credit for my work. Of course, commissioned work will not automatically be placed in the commons, so potential clients need not worry compromising their rights.

Why I choose to give up control outside of these bounds is a more philosophical question. When I first began exploring my artistic side, I did so by building off of other artists' work — by making collages and altering images I found on the web. Because I never distributed this work it remains in something of a legal gray area, but the point remains that had I "respected" the copyrights of these works I would never have begun my artistic journey at all.

Moreover, at a certain level no photograph is "original." The people, animals, and landscapes we see were already there. Sculptures and buildings are the works of other artists. Even our ideas about composition are often borrowed from other works. What is unique about photography is the interpretation of the moment. That's where the art is. But at the same time we must remember that the photographer who sees that moment is just one part of the creative process — the work itself began long before and it will continue long after. Licensing my work under the Creative Commons is a way of accepting this truth about the art I've chosen to call my own.

Often we are taught that art is a form of communication, that everything since the earliest cave paintings has been designed to share the artist's understanding of the world and themselves with their audience. From this point of view, what defines a piece of art is how well it communicates the artist's message. There is much to be said for this perspective, but it fails to recognize that the interplay between the artist and the audience need not be one directional, and that there is more to art than meaning alone.

There is another way to understand art.

One of the behaviors that best defines our species is its obsession with prosthetics. The most primitive prosthetic is the simple tool — the tree branch we use to knock something into reach, or the bowl-shaped rock we use to gather food. Other species use these sorts of tools, but humanity has refined this approach with a gusto unheard of in other species. We made knives. We made spears and axes. We made baskets, bowls, houses, and clothes. Stone became metal. Muscle was replaced by steam and electricity. With an ever-quickening pace the world we live in today emerged.

At the same time we were fashioning tools we began to apply the same ideas to our bodies, creating replacements for lost limbs. Today we can replace many of our organs with seemingly magical creations of metal and plastic. And some of these replacements have become better than the originals.

This is particularly true for another class of prosthetics — prosthetics not for our bodies, but for our minds. The most obvious of these is the computer, using which even the most mathematically-challenged of us can solve problems that were virtually impossible to comprehend only a few lifetimes ago. Less obvious the Internet, a vast repository of knowledge, increasingly accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere. The Internet is a prosthetic for our memory.

But it was not the first.

This is the other way to understand art — as a prosthetic for our minds, a way of enhancing our memory. The artist captures not what is or what was, but what was perceived and remembered. While the Internet holds facts and figures, the painting and the photograph captures the moment. The poem and the symphony brings forth our emotions. The story and the play remembers our dreams.

The Internet and the encyclopedia help us remember how the world works, but art is what allows us to remember how the world feels. This is the role I see for myself — not to transcribe an absolute record of events or to write down a complete description of my fellow beings, but to capture the totality of the moment. Not to help us see what was, but to help us know what was seen.

For me this means capturing the moments where the connectedness of all things become apparent, the times we realize there is no "you" and "I," only us. No "man" and "nature," only what is. No "past" and "future," only now.

For me, photography is a way to see the world as it really is, as a whole rather than a part. To remember what I've seen. And to give that memory to you.