Bill Silliman Biography

Bill Silliman was raised on his father's farm at York, North Dakota and attended Leeds High School.  His first camera was a Kodak Brownie when he was in high school. Growing up in an area where there was lots of wildlife including white tail deer, ducks, geese and whooping cranes that flew over the farm, he has always been interested in the outdoors.  As a child he remembers chasing the small Killdeer birds around the fields.  When you were too close to a nest, the birds would go into their broken wing act and lead us away from the nest.

He graduated from North Dakota State University with a BS in Pharmacy. 

When he was in college, his brother-in-law, Ozzie Twedt, who played NDSU basketball gave him one of his cameras. It was a Ricoh which he still has.

His first pharmacy position was in Manassas, Virginia where he met a photographer who enrolled him in The Famous Photographers School, whose guiding faculty included, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Bert Stern, Philippe Halsman and more.

He continued taking photography courses and creating many photographs which he later sold in Laguna Beach, CA when he was juried into Art-A-Fair. 

His early photographs were shot with two Canon A-1 cameras and several L Series lenses mostly on Kodachrom 64 transparency film or his medium format Hasselblad C-500 which he still uses occasionally.  Since then he has transferred to the digital era.

An avid skier, he retired from being a pharmacist and moved to Park City, Utah from Irvine, CA in 2007 so he could be closer to the mountains and his favorite sport of skiing.  He has been able to heli ski in Alaska for four weeks a year for the past nine years at Points North Heli Adventures which is located in Cordova, AK.  He has many photographs of the heli skiers skiing The Chugatch Range.

He recently had an article published about his many years of heli-skiing at Points North Heli-Adventures in Alaska. Titled: Sensory Overload. Click here for the link.

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/farwestskiersguide/2012-13/#/62

He also has a skiing website which has photos of heli-skiing in Alaska.  www.monoskiusa.com

I hope my photography inspires you to get out and enjoy the beauty of nature.  Take a camera with you so you can record "that moment in time."

Look for his Rowanda Gorilla photos and the Serengeti big 5 photos in March of 2018