In the early 1980s, Bruce Jackson was fired from a job waiting tables.

“It was the first time I’d ever been fired from a job in my life,” said Jackson. “I got fired because I wasn’t fast enough. And that’s when I drew the line in the sand and said, ‘That’s it. I’m never working for anybody else again, and I’m going to go do whatever I have to do to make a living in photography.”

He’s been keeping his own time ever since.

Jackson went on to forge a career and a name for himself, patiently awaiting the right moments to capture landscapes around Oregon and other parts of the Northwest.

Over a couple of decades, he sold some 30,000 posters from a pair of Mt. Bachelor photographs, and his stunning Three Sisters’ photo, “Faith, Hope and Charity,” shot from a plane, hangs in downtown Bend eatery Alpenglow.

A gifted storyteller who once wanted to be a writer, Jackson unspooled the tale of his metamorphosis into a photographer, and other colorful stories of his life, over one cup of coffee and two hours of conversation last week at Strictly Organic in the Old Mill District.

The 61-year-old sipped his decaf just a few doors down from Tumalo Art Co., an artist-run gallery he joined eight years ago. This month, he’s debuting three new prints as part of a shared show with painter Alisa Huntley. It marks the popular landscape photographer’s first new fine-art photographs since he released a single print last fall. His last large show there was in 2010.

“He doesn’t rush into releasing a new edition … just like he takes time with the creation of those images. He’s a perfectionist, and it shows,” said Susan Luckey Higdon, a fellow member of the gallery.

Higdon believes Jackson’s work has become “iconic to Central Oregon.”

“Most important is the quality of the photograph, but he really seems to go with his heart and intuition when choosing which images to release. He has a master’s eye for composition, color and capturing the right moment on film,” she said.

Intro to photography

Growing up in Salem, Jackson flirted with photography, but it would take several years for the interest to solidify.

“My first exposure to photography — no pun intended — was in the ninth grade,” Jackson said. “I was on the school annual staff, and the supervisor said, ‘OK, who wants to be the photographer?’

“Nobody raised their hand, and then they looked over at me and said, ‘Bruce, you should be the photographer!’ I kind of shrugged my shoulders, and said, ‘Oh, OK.’ So I was the photographer for the annual that year.”

Jackson’s yearbook work could have been the end of it, but of course, we know it wasn’t. By 10th grade, a friend took over yearbook duties. “I got a lot of photographs taken of me, but I didn’t photograph anything to speak of.”

But Jackson would decide to attend Central Oregon Community College in Bend. He began studies there in January 1970, later switching his major from business to art.

Spring quarter, he and several friends took a black-and-white-photography class from William Van Allen, a popular photographer and teacher who died in 1977, according to Bulletin archives.

“He was a very famous black-and-white photographer from this area,” explains Jackson, who bought his first camera, a Neoka 35 mm rangefinder, the first day of class. “We had a great time with it.”

Nevertheless, he would take another break from photography, focusing on his first love, skiing. The winter of 1970-71, his second year at COCC, he ski raced for the school.

After his second year of school, he joined a friend who’d been skiing at Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah its first year of operations. “It was incredible. It was like helicopter-powder skiing, because nobody knew about the ski area yet. There were hardly any people there.”

Jackson wound up spending the next two winters at Snowbird, working the first year at the resort, the second at his first table-waiting job.

“It wasn’t really my thing, but it got me through the winter. I skied all the time. That was why we were there; we were ski bums,” he said.

Back in Bend for the winter of 1976, he joined the ski patrol at Mt. Bachelor.

Timing is everything for a photographer. At work one day, he learned famed ski-film director Warren Miller, who’s calling card is making a film every year, would be visiting the following week to shoot footage at the mountain for a pair of films.

“My boss asked me if I wanted to work with Warren Miller, and I said, ‘Of course I want to work with Warren Miller!’” Jackson said.

When Miller arrived, Jackson carried film equipment. “Towards the end of the day, he asked me if I would ski in the footage the rest of the week. That was a 25-year-old, testosterone-loaded ski bum’s dream come true.”

The footage ended up in a small film about skiing the Cascades, as well as in “Skiing on my Mind,” which would premiere in fall 1976.

The experience with Miller reawakened his interest in photography, which really began to take root in the summer of 1976, when he worked fighting forest fires.

It was a light fire year, and he began borrowing his roommate and fire crew mate Jeff Fox’s camera, a Pentax 35 mm single-lens reflex camera.

“When I knew he had that camera and he wasn’t using it, I asked if I might be able to borrow it,” Jackson said. “He said, ‘Of course.’ And then he saw how much fun I was having and said, ‘Why don’t you just keep it for the summer. If I need it, I’ll get it from you.’”

Between the cabin’s setting upstream from Detroit Lake and helicopter flights, there were “a lot of photogenic things going on around me,” Jackson said. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but I was excited about it.”

He would closely examine the photographs whenever he had them developed, “trying to figure out what I could do different and better to make a better photograph,” he said. “I was real disciplined about that.”

Back in Salem for the fall, “I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do with my life,” he said. His mother, a school librarian, would bring home books on photography that he pored over. He also bought his own SLR camera.

“Literally, the first frame on the first roll of film, this unbelievable sunset was going on over Salem. We lived up on a hill … and I took a photo from one of my mom’s little decks of this sunset, and it turned out really well. And I thought, ‘Maybe this is a sign.’”

From flowers to landscapes

For a few years in the late 1970s, he moved into his mother Imogene’s house and built a darkroom in the garage. “I thought, for some reason, I could have a better chance of making a career out of photography in Salem, where there were bigger population areas, than in Bend,” Jackson said.

Working as a field technician for an agricultural corporation, he would shoot photos of test plots of flowers.

“I really got into photographing flowers,” he said. “That really laid the groundwork for my interest and passion for photographing flowers down the road.” That passion can be seen in one of the new prints, “Sun Salutations,” a shot of lupine and other wildflowers taken at Tom McCall Nature Conservancy in the Columbia River Gorge in April.

Missing the merits of Bend, Jackson moved back in 1980. That’s when he took his fateful second job waiting tables, at the erstwhile Mexicali Rose. He lasted about four months before getting fired.

“It was really a blessing in disguise,” he said. Friends and family were encouraging of his plan to make a go of photography.

The winter of 1980-81, he joined friend and fellow photographer Brian Robb on a planned hike of Tumalo Mountain to shoot neighboring Bachelor. Robb had struck a deal to exchange a poster photo of Mt. Bachelor for a pair of ski boots.

The two had met ski racing years earlier. “We vied for seventh place,” Robb said.

Robb got his shot — and his boots. Jackson kept hiking to a higher meadow.

“I just sensed I needed to climb higher,” Jackson said. “I went to the upper meadow. I got up there and went, ‘Wow! Now we’re talking.”

He was still using his 35 mm camera. He liked the resultant shots, but he wanted to make a big print that wouldn’t lose resolution, and knew that would require new equipment.

He bought a 4-by-5-inch film camera at another former Bend business, Dotson’s Photo Center. “This is all trial by fire, learning on the run, and so I’m making some mistakes — but I don’t usually make them twice, thank goodness,” he said.

He went back to Tumalo Mountain and took more shots, and began selling prints at ski shops and bookstores, but the spring lighting on the mountain, he knew, wasn’t quite right.

It was his big “a-ha” moment with lighting. “I was so focused on getting things out on the market, and trying to sell (them), that I didn’t pick up on that till a little while later,” he said. “I realized, ‘I have to reshoot this. This will not fly.’”

His father, a finish carpenter and firefighter, was a perfectionist, and the younger Jackson had inherited that trait.

“What Bruce does, is he ties the scene of what he’s taking into his feelings on life,” friend Robb said. “He really translates the way he personally views life in the form of his photography.”

Poster success

In 1982, Jackson was working in Blue Sky Gallery and Framing, and knew that the fine art poster business “was really flying.”

Looking through the poster catalogs, he knew he wanted to turn a not-yet-taken photo of Mt. Bachelor into a poster. Besides taking the shot, he wanted to make and market it himself.

More self-teaching entailed. “Ignorance is bliss, you know,” he said. He would need money, so he headed to Alaska’s Bristol Bay to work in the fishing industry for seven months, then spent another five months in 1983 doing finish carpentry in Anchorage with his old buddy Jeff Fox, whose camera Jackson had borrowed.

“All I did was stockpile money to publish this poster,” Jackson said. He came back to Bend in December 1983 to get his photo.

“I was really burned out, and was really questioning whether I could pull this thing off,” he said. “Once I got back into the area, I realized, ‘Yes. This has to be done.’”

He kept an eye on the weather, and on Jan. 11, 1984, he hiked up Tumalo Mountain and got the shot that would become his first poster.

His goal was to get the poster out by February 1.

“I had it all mapped out,” he said. While the color work and printing were being done, he worked on point-of-purchase displays. A loan from a neighbor who worked as a loan officer at a bank helped him bridge the gap in funds.

He borrowed $7,500, but the posters, titled “The Summit — Mt. Bachelor,” sold well, about 80 percent of them in Central Oregon, the rest in Portland.

“From the time I started selling the posters, I broke even in seven weeks,” Jackson said. “It took off beyond my wildest imagination.”

In 1986, he made a poster of Mt. Hood, a view of the mountain replicating the view “everyone (in Portland) has this emotional connection with,” he said, albeit taken closer to the mountain. In 1989, he did another successful poster, titled “Pine Marten — Mt. Bachelor.”

Decades of travel and photography have ensued for Jackson..

Though over the decades he spent plenty of time in the mountains, knee problems forced Jackson to take a 20-year break from skiing. The break coincided with the launch of his career, and Jackson said he was able to “transfer that passion (into photography) for 20 years.”

He never married, but said he’d been in a couple of long-term relationships.

“I’m a happy person being by myself. I’m comfortable spending a lot of alone time, so that’s not a detriment,” he said of being single. “I love that freedom, and my kind of lifestyle, I love to be able to do my activities the way I really, really want to do them, without all that much compromise: skiing, photographing, that kind of thing.”

He’s a dancer, too, and can frequently be seen at McMenamins Old St. Francis School on Wednesday nights, He also makes a good partner at Tumalo Art Co., said Higdon. She calls Jackson “an integral part of our group. Lots of people come in specifically to see his work. And it’s powerful, so even if they haven’t seen his photographs before, they are very drawn to them. But Bruce works just as hard at connecting art lovers to whatever artist they gravitate to at the gallery. He’s a team player.”

Before releasing a single print at Tumalo Art Co. last fall, his last time releasing several new editions at once came in November 2010, when he released six pieces. Five months earlier, his mother had moved to Bend.

His 86-year-old mother was at that opening, and suffered a stroke exactly a week later, he told The Bulletin in a follow-up email. She died two days later.

“She was really my rock growing up,” wrote Jackson. “She encouraged me in whatever I wanted to do. We were very good friends, really enjoyed being together.

“Who knows, maybe that is partly why I didn’t release much new work till now. Her passing was definitely a tough time for me.”

In 2003, his knee problems resolved, he was able to give skiing another try.

“I literally feel 35 when I ski. I feel 17,” said Jackson, who, as fate would have it, is contemplating shooting a ski video as his next goal.

“It’s just a matter of learning,” said Jackson, who said his motto in life is “Tune into my intuition, read it clearly, and act on it with courage.”