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After a decade of selling prints of his landscape photographs taken around the world, Mickey Shannon has published his first book and it’s dedicated to his home state.
“Kansas is Beautiful” is a 144-page, hardcover, 10 inch by 13 inch coffee table style book. Shannon, who grew up in Derby and now lives in Goddard, self-published the book. It retails for $64.99 and can be purchased directly from his website at mickeyshannon.com/ksbook as well as at select local bookstores and gift shops.
Another way to see his work is at Exploration Place in downtown Wichita. Museum staff invited Shannon to showcase nearly 30 of his images in their new gallery space outside the Dome Theater. The “Kansas is Beautiful” exhibition opened to coincide with the publication of the book in April and will be on display through at least the end of 2023.
Shannon is a self-taught photographer who bought his first real camera in 2007 and started to sell his prints in 2011. He operates Mickey Shannon Photography and also works in web development at Friends University.
He said he began envisioning publishing a book as early as 2015 but knew he wanted to self-publish to retain creative control of the project. That meant waiting until he could fund the printing of the initial 1,500 copies of the book, which was supported by sales of his fine art prints as well as financial assistance from a Koch Cultural Trust grant.
The book, which debuted in April of this year, features one of his best-selling images on the cover. “Monument Rocks Milky Way Panorama” was the result of at least three nighttime photo missions to Monument Rocks in western Kansas. If you look closely, you’ll see that Shannon appears in the photo under the arch of the massive chalk formation.
“That one really catches people’s attention because there’s a lot of dynamic to it,” he said. “Not only is it a panoramic of the Milky Way over Monument Rocks, but then on the right side of the photo there was a fireball that streaked across the sky. The fireball is really small in the photo because I just caught the tail. end of it. People always ask how I got the light; most think it’s a sun rise image but it’s actually the moon rising behind the Milky Way.”
In addition to well-known Kansas landmarks like Monument Rocks and urban scenes including Wichita, Shannon also chose images from lesser-traveled locations where he captured backroads, wildflowers, waterfalls and other natural scenes. Within the book’s pages are images filling double page spreads with famous quotes as well as half-page images accompanied by stories behind how Shannon captured the photos.
Next to “The Floodgates Open,” a 2015 image taken after a heavy rainfall of a waterfall not far from Wichita, he writes: “I shot this at Santa Fe Lake, just west of Augusta. This part of Kansas holds a special place in my heart. My grandparents owned a piece of land between Andover and Augusta, just southwest of Santa Fe Lake, where I spent much of my childhood. It wasn’t until many years later on my quest to visit as many Kansas waterfalls as possible that I realized there was a waterfall at the lake.”
Another included photograph is one that he said goes viral anytime he posts it online. In the story that accompanies “Keeper of the Plains Lightning Bolt,” he writes: “The shot above taken in 2009 was one of my first award-winning images, having been a finalist in a photography contest with Smithsonian magazine. That summer was particularly stormy, so I spent a number of nights seeing what kinds of photographs I could get out there. At the time, I didn’t own a lightning trigger, so I was photographing lightning manually hoping to get lucky. One night, I did. I couldn’t have tried to frame the iconic Wichita statue within this lightning bolt any better.”
Shannon attributes his success to continuing to evolve as a photographer and applying his expertise as a web developer to his photography website, mickeyshannon.com.
Growing up in Kansas and family trips to outdoor destinations in Colorado, Oklahoma and South Dakota stoked his interest in nature. Picking up a disposable camera in his late teens, Shannon found he had an eye for composing landscape photographs. Finally in 2007, while in college at Friends University, he bought his first digital SLR camera and began reading nature photography books.
Shannon said he spent most of a 2009 trip to the Swiss and French Alps taking photos and at the end of the vacation he knew he wanted to be a professional landscape photographer. He began selling prints of his work in 2011, and the decision in 2018 to focus on fine art prints of his photographs helped grow the business. His image “Moraine Lake Sunrise Brilliance” taken in Lake Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada, put him on the map among collectors, he said. But how did they find an image of this famous lake taken by a Kansas-based photographer?
“Since I do web development in my day job, I understand how to get myself high up in Google searches,” he said. “That’s helped me build up a website that does very well on Google. If you search for Kansas photography, I’m probably the first to come up. I’m usually in the top three if you were to search Colorado photography or Hawaii photography, and that’s really helped people find me.”
The Moraine Lake image is his top seller, followed by “Golden Light in the Flint Hills,” a sunset view of green, rolling hills to the east of Tuttle Creek Lake near Manhattan.
“I took that in the summer of 2020 or 2021,” Shannon said, “and it took me a few months to even process those images because I didn’t think they were going to be that great. Once I did, I thought that one was really good and it has turned out to be one of my best-sellers. I have buyers for that one not just in Kansas, but all over the country. They might be people from Kansas who moved, I’m not sure, but it’s nice to know that people in other parts of the country also think Kansas is beautiful enough to hang my print on their wall.”
That print is one of the few limited editions within Shannon’s Kansas collection. He prefers to keep his Kansas images as open editions – meaning there is no limit to how many he’ll print and sell – to make them more accessible to anyone who wants to purchase. Open editions can be purchased in smaller sizes and cost less than a limited edition. As an example, a 24”x16” print of the limited edition “Moraine Lake Sunrise Brilliance” has only 200 prints available and starts at $350 depending on the type of media the customer chooses for the print. An open edition Keeper of the Plains image in the same size starts at $280 depending on the print type selected.
Having a number of limited editions in his portfolio has helped Shannon qualify for showing and selling his work at fine art shows including Autumn & Art, scheduled for Sept. 15-17 in Wichita. At press time, formal invites hadn’t gone out for the event but he’s attended the past two years.
Shannon’s work is on display at other regional events throughout the year and he also has book signings scheduled. See a list of those events on his website at mickeyshannon.com/event-schedule.
Meanwhile, Shannon continues to take trips and capture more images around the world that he’ll add to his website and that could end up in a book.
“I’m hoping to do more books if this one continues to sell well,” he said. “It was a really fun process.”
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