Josh Anon has been a nature photographer for most of his life, with his interest in photography starting when he received his first Kodak 110 camera at the ripe old age of 4. Camera in hand, he received a B.S. in computer science from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
After graduating, Josh started working at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, California. There he has worked on The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Toy Story 3, and more. Currently he is a camera and staging artist.
He has traveled the globe searching for the next great picture, be it 100 feet deep on the Great Barrier Reef, on a cold and windy beach in the South Atlantic, or inside the Arctic Circle. His award-winning images, represented by the prestigious Jaynes Gallery and available on www.joshanon.com, have appeared in a variety of galleries, calendars, and other publications, including the San Diego Natural History museum, Nature's Best, Photo Media, The Kiteboarder, and more. Josh teaches photography, both privately and for the Panasonic Digital Photo Academy, and he and his mother, Ellen, have also coauthored Aperture Exposed (Sybex, 2006) Photoshop CS5 for Nature Photographers (Sybex 2010), and more. He is also a cofounder of DSLRU (www.dslru.com).
Josh continues to develop software in his free time, currently focusing on FlipBook, which is movie-making software for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.
When not shooting, making cartoons, or coding, Josh can be found kiteboarding.
Ellen Anon got her start with photography at age 5, but for years it remained a hobby as she took a very long fork in the road, eventually earning a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Finally, a broken foot in 1997 forced her to take a break from work as a psychologist and she used the time to study photography. She debated briefly between building a traditional darkroom in her home and creating a digital darkroom. Because she's not fond of being closed up in small dark spaces with strong smells of funky chemicals, she opted for the latter. Ever since, photography has been a two-part process for her. Making the image in the field is step one, and optimizing it in the digital darkroom is step two. Being creative with it is the icing on the cake!
Ellen is now a freelance photographer, speaker, and writer. Her goal with her photographs is to go beyond the ordinary in ways that she hopes stimulate others to pause and appreciate some of the beauty and wonder of our earth. Ellen's images are included in collections in several countries. She is represented by several stock agencies, and her photos have been showcased in galleries, used in numerous publications (including Sierra Club's Mother Earth and Inner Reflections 2010 calendar). In addition, she has been Highly Honored in Nature's Best Photography Windland Smith Rice International Awards and Highly Commended in the 2008 BBC/Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. She is honored to be a member of the Aperture Advisory Board and is an Apple Certified Trainer for Aperture.
In addition to Aperture 3 Portable Genius, Ellen is the coauthor, along with Josh, of the series Photoshop CS5 for Nature Photographers: A Workshop in a Book (Sybex, 2010), and Aperture Exposed (2006). She has contributed chapters to several other books and she creates video training materials on digital software for several companies including www.maccreate.com. Ellen leads both photographic- and digital darkroom–oriented workshops and is a featured speaker at various events. She is an active member of the North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA) and is an instructor for its high school scholarship program. She is honored to be a member of Nik software's Team Nik.