Sixty Years of Photography and Aviation

Mac Tippins is an award-winning wildland-fire, landscape, nature, and aviation photographer from Greenville, South Carolina. Tippins grew up in Griffin, Georgia, and graduated from Georgia Tech.

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He recently completed a two-year solo gallery show of his photography at the South Carolina Botanical Garden, on the campus of Clemson University, with images that emphasized the fragility and beauty of America's public lands. Additionally, Mac is the recipient of a 2015 Emmy Award for a PBS documentary on a wilderness fire lookout in Arizona (produced in collaboration with Arizona Public Media).

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Tippins works from his Bo Zarts Studio on Caesar's Head Mountain, SC, and maintains a permanent display as principal artist at the Chicora Alley Firehouse Gallery in Traveler's Rest, SC. Geographically, his photography spans the continent, from Florida wetlands to the High Desert and Cascade Range of Oregon; from Louisiana Cypress swamps and the Llano Estacado of West Texas, to wilderness trails in the Canadian Rockies; and, most recently, from the 2020 fire season in the high country of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho and the 2023 fire season in the St. Joe Ranger District of the Idaho Panhandle National Forests.

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As a US Army fixed-wing pilot, Mac Tippins flew electronic counter-warfare missions in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It was during that tour-of-duty in Southeast Asia fifty years ago that Mac honed his photography skills with a 35mm Pentax SLR film camera.

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Post-Vietnam, Tippins flew Learjets and Lockheed JetStars for a Fortune 100 corporation in Texas. He then spent nearly three decades as a pilot for a major airline in the US, retiring as an MD-80 captain. During that time period, he also worked as an aviation writer and photographer, and as editor-in-chief of an international aviation trade magazine. Mac also served on the Air Line Pilot Association (ALPA) Central Air Safety Committee as an airline accident investigator.

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After retiring from airline flying, Mac Tippins worked ten fire seasons with the US Forest Service: five fire seasons in the Deschutes National Forest of Oregon, three fire seasons in south Arizona's Coronado National Forest, a fire season in the Salmon-Challis National Forest of central Idaho, and most recently the 2023 fire season in the Idaho panhandle. Those ten seasons of fire detection from wilderness fire lookout towers provided Tippins with unmatched opportunities at landscape, nature, and wildland fire photography.

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