Photo project documents rivers of the interior U.S.

Those are beautiful shots And interesting subject matter. I wish he would've used an iPhone too so we could get some side-by-sides to compare.

As an avid fisherman (I actually fished the French Broad, where this project began, in April.) living in the rust belt, a project like this really speaks to me. Though I rarely fish the big rivers, it's all too common to see the scars (and in some cases open wounds) of industrialization on the streams and creeks that feed the big water.

There are riverbeds dyed orange from decades of industrial dumping and acid mine drainage, and miles of flowing water more or less completely devoid of fish...even so, over the past twenty years, great progress has been made toward undoing that damage, and the recovery has been very promising.

Now, with most of the steel industry a thing of the past, fracking threatens these waters, and I guess only time will tell if the people around here will take a lesson from history.

The Flint River in Georgia is listed as a threatened water way in the U.S. In the late 70's the Corp of Engineers decided they were going to dam it without basically telling anyone. The only way anyone found out was when the bulldozers arrived at one the the major put-ins. My brother, and the wildlife club he belonged to, contacted then Governor Jimmy Carter and took him on a canoeing trip down the river. Only then did the dam project get halted.

To me, the photos in the article on wired.com have a look which I remember seeing in the print edition of National Geographic about twenty years ago. (We stopped subscribing.) What's the secret of this look? Grading? Composition? Are photos with people staged?