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Copyright © 1983 to 2016 Richard I. Pietz Photography
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Richard I. Pietz grew up on a farm in southwestern Minnesota and attended high school in Walnut Grove. He received a BS (1965), MS (1967), and Ph.D (1971) in Soil Science at the University of Minnesota.
His interest in photography began when he purchased a Nikon Nikkormat FTN camera while in graduate school. This initiated his interest to use photography for personal and work related activities. It also provided a creative outlet to capture his love of nature and family activities.
After graduation, he worked at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC from 1971 through 1972 on a contract with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to revise water quality criteria to protect the nation's waters.
In September of 1972, he went to Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana as a Post Doctoral Research Associate in Soil Science to work on a multi department project to evaluate the environmental contamination of Northwest Indiana by heavy metals from the industrial complex adjacent to Lake Michigan. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation.
In July of 1973, Dr. Pietz began work as a soil scientist for the Research and Development Department of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (District). The District had began pioneering work on the land application of biosolids (sewage sludge) to reclaim strip-mined land at a 15,200 acre site in west central Illinois (Fulton County Land Reclamation Site). Dr. Pietz developed and staffed a laboratory at the site to conduct extensive monitoring and research activities. He used photography to document these activities for presentations at meetings, conferences, and seminars, and in publications on monitoring and research activities.
On the personal side, his growth and love for photography continued. It was used to document family activities, landscapes, nature, animals and wildlife, and places visited during family vacations in all 48 states.
In April of 1993, Dr. Pietz was transferred to Chicago to be head of the Land Reclamation and Soil Science Section of the District's R&D Department. The use of photography was continued in documenting the District's research and montoring activities related to the beneficial use of biosolids on land. He was promoted to assistant head of the Environmental Monitoring and Research Division in June of 1998 with the responsibility of supervising and coordinating the activities of four sections.
Dr. Pietz retired from 31 years at the District in April of 2004. Photography was used in several of the over 105 research publications, articles, and book chapters he wrote or co-authored, and in countless oral presentations made locally, in the US, and outside the US in his 31 years of work at the District.
Retirement has provided greater opportunity to use photography to record his vision of landscapes, nature, animals and wildlife, places, and the beautiful world around us. It has also provided more time for him to scan previously taken transparencies, put the digital images into a master file, and to concentrate on digital photography with digital cameras.
All photographs appearing on this site are the property of Richard I. Pietz. They are protected by the U.S. copyright laws with an embedded invisible watermark (Digimarc) for Richard I. Pietz, and they are not to be downloaded or reproduced in any way without the written permission of Richard I. Pietz.
