2 days ago | Advertorial | Ellen Wray

“I spent my life taking pictures of animals. Now I can’t see them.” – Ray (73) is selling his last wildlife calendars at a special price. His most popular edition is going into retirement.

For forty-five years, Ray Kessler photographed wild animals across Montana, Alaska and one stretch of South African coastline — roughly 400,000 photographs, every one taken by hand, in the cold, waiting. Now the seventy-three-year-old is putting the camera down for good — and saying goodbye with the twelve photographs he is proudest of. Why are his calendars suddenly in such demand? Because this is the last time it will ever be offered.

Ray Kessler (73) in the stand of pine he has photographed since 1994. After forty-five years, he is closing his life’s work.

Ninemile Valley, September. The shed behind the house smells of paper, dust and cold coffee. On the metal shelves sit hundreds of labeled binders — owls, bears, elk, penguins, sorted by year. On the workbench lie twelve prints in a row, January through December, and a magnifying glass on top of them. Ray Kessler leans over the prints, the way he has every autumn since 2009. But this year is different. This is his last selection.

“I’m seventy-three,” he says quietly. “My eyes don’t do what they used to. The middle of everything I look at is going soft — the doctors call it macular degeneration.” He taps the magnifying glass on the bench. “But that’s not the only reason. The world changed too. Nobody pays for someone to sit in a forest for thirty years anymore. They buy a picture from a stock library for four dollars. My way of working… it’s disappearing.”

Forty-Five Years, 400,000 Photographs — A Life Spent Waiting For Animals

Ray has done the math. In forty-five years he took roughly 400,000 photographs and kept the negatives and files for every single one. “In the beginning it was just field guides and state pamphlets,” he says. “Then people started asking for prints. Then a neighbor asked for something for a church fundraiser in 2009, and instead of prints I laid twelve of them out by month. That was the first calendar. That’s how all of this started.”

He sold them off a card table at the Missoula farmers’ market for seventeen years — first a few dozen, then a few hundred every autumn.

The same stand of pine, thirty-one springs running. The dark hollow in the trunk has held nesting owls since at least 1994.

Eleven Summers On The Alaskan Coast

Katmai coast, mid-1990s. Six weeks at a stretch in a wall tent, photographing across the water.

The work that actually paid was in Alaska. From 1988 onward Ray spent eleven summers on the Katmai coast under contract, six weeks at a time, sleeping in a canvas wall tent on the gravel. Brown bear sows with cubs, photographed from across a shallow river at a distance he still measures in yards.

“You don’t photograph a mother bear,” he says. “You ask her permission and then you photograph her cubs. If she says no, you back up.” He backed up once, in 1993, for two hundred yards — slowly, sideways, the whole way. He kept every frame from that morning.

The One Trip He Ever Took Abroad

Boulders Beach, South Africa, June 1996. Marguerite logged every frame by hand; Ray pressed the button.

In June 1996 he flew to South Africa with his wife Marguerite and stayed three weeks near Simon’s Town. It was the only time he ever photographed outside North America, and the only trip she came along for. She sat on the granite with a spiral notebook and logged every exposure — time, light, distance, which bird.

“Three hundred and eleven frames in three weeks,” he says. “She numbered every one of them.” He has never sold a single picture from that trip. They sat in a box in the shed for thirty years.

“I Have Customers Whose 2011 Calendar Is Still On The Wall”

Ray pulls a shoebox out from under the workbench. Inside are hundreds of letters and cards. “Those are thank-you notes from customers. Some of them write every single year,” he says. He takes one out, dated 2012. It reads: “Dear Mr. Kessler, your April page has been in our kitchen for two years now. I know we should have taken it down. We didn’t.”

There is a simple reason those pages stay up: they are photographs, not stock images. While a mass-produced calendar licenses twelve pictures nobody in the building has ever seen, Ray waited for each of his — sometimes for years. Some of the owl frames took thirty-one consecutive springs at one tree to accumulate.

Twelve survive out of roughly 33,000. “The hard part was never the shot,” Ray says. “It was throwing the rest away.”

The End Of An Era — And One Last Chance

At the end of October, Ray is closing the archive for good. “I don’t have a successor. Nobody wants to learn this — it takes twenty years before you know where to sit and when to be quiet.” On the shelves there are still around 1,200 calendars from the final print run. His life’s work. The last collection that will ever pass through his hands.

To get them into good hands before the new year, he decided to do something unusual: a substantial discount on every edition. “It isn’t about the money anymore,” Ray says. “I want these on walls where somebody actually looks at them. With people who understand what goes into sitting still for six hours in the cold.” He grins. “My grandkids Casey (26) and Dylan (29) handle the internet side for me — at my age I don’t know the first thing about all that online business.”

Casey does the scanning, Dylan handles the orders. “They’ve seen more of my archive in two years than I showed anybody in forty,” Ray says. And what began as twelve prints for a church fundraiser became, for thousands of customers, a small morning ritual.

What Sets Ray’s Calendars Apart

• 100% real photography: Every single picture was taken by Ray himself, in the place and year printed on the page. No stock libraries, no licensed images, no computer-built scenery.
• The Three-Pass Selection: Twelve photographs survive out of roughly 33,000 per edition — only frames where the animal is genuinely doing something.
• Field notes on every month: Place and year printed under each photograph, the same way Ray has labeled his frames since 1981.
• Twin-wire spiral spine: Hangs flat against the wall for a full twelve months instead of curling away from it.
• Large writable date blocks: Room for appointments, birthdays and reminders with a normal pen. As Ray puts it: if you can’t write in it, it’s a poster.
• Genuinely limited: Only around 1,200 calendars remain from Ray’s final run. Once an edition sells out, there will never be a new one.

Three Editions — Three Parts Of One Career

There are three editions, and each one covers a different stretch of Ray’s working life. When one sells out, it is gone.

Montana · 1994 – 2025

Owls

Thirty-one springs at one stand of ponderosa pine nine miles from Ray’s kitchen, where great horned owls have used the same hollow since 1994. Four generations of birds out of one tree. Nobody ever paid him for this work — he did it anyway.

“Same hollow since 1994. Different birds, same hollow.”

Katmai Coast, Alaska · 1988 – 1999

Bear Cubs

Eleven summers on the Alaskan coast, six weeks at a stretch in a wall tent. This was the contract work that paid for the house in Montana — and the closest Ray ever came to ending his career the hard way, on a gravel bar in 1993.

“You don’t photograph a mother bear. You ask her permission and photograph her cubs.”

Boulders Beach, South Africa · 1996

Penguins

The only trip Ray ever took outside North America — three weeks in 1996, and the only expedition his wife Marguerite came along for. She sat on the rocks with a notebook and logged all 311 frames by hand. Her handwriting is still on the back of every one.

“Marguerite wrote the notes. I just pressed the button.”

What Real Customers Say About Ray’s Calendars

“The Perfect Gift For Someone You Actually Care About”

What makes one of these calendars such a good gift is not only the photography. It is the story behind it. “When you give somebody this calendar, you’re giving them forty-five years of somebody sitting still in the cold,” Ray says. “And something that will never exist again.”

Customer Sabine M. (48) from Portland confirms it: “I gave my mother the owl edition two weeks ago. She got teary. Not because of the calendar itself — because she read the little notes and understood that a real person had waited for each of those birds. You cannot buy that feeling in a store.”

Where Can You Buy Ray’s Calendars?

You can only get Ray’s calendars through Namora — an online shop that specializes in genuine work by individual makers. His grandchildren Casey and Dylan run Ray’s own small shop section there. That is the only place you get the original editions from his archive.

On Amazon and similar marketplaces there are now cheap imitations circulating — wildlife calendars with computer-generated animal images that look vaguely similar but have nothing to do with Ray’s photography. Those pictures were never taken. Nobody waited for them.

Only This Fall — Then It’s Over

Ray plans to close the archive for good on October 31. “Until then I’d like to see all of them go to people who want them. After that it really is finished,” he says quietly. He smiles a little. “Forty-five years. It was a good run.”

Anyone who wants one of the calendars from Ray’s final collection should not wait. Between the special price and the run-up to Christmas, the remaining stock is not expected to last long.

This is the last chance to put a genuine piece of forty-five years of field photography on your own wall — before Ray’s calendars are history for good.

What People Are Saying Online