Fleming is a photographer and graphic designer who owns Bonzeye Studio in downtown Rapid City. The natural beauty of western South Dakota inspires much of her work, including a line of stickers. On Dec. 10, one day before the Legion Lake Fire ignited, Fleming’s newest sticker design proclaiming “I Love the Black Hills” debuted in her studio.

As the Legion Lake Fire burned 85 square miles in Custer State Park, Wind Cave National Park and private land, Fleming launched an impromptu fire recovery fundraiser. She posted a video on Facebook on Dec. 14 announcing the sale of “I Love the Black Hills” stickers at $4 each. Fleming’s goal was to raise $1,000. The fundraiser turned out “a little bit better than anticipated,” Fleming said, laughing.

“I didn’t expect to raise the $7,000 at all. I thought I would sell stickers and give the money away. The response was simply overwhelming. We received online orders from every corner of the country. We sold thousands in just two short weeks. I’ve never done anything that took off like this.”

The sticker’s sentiment struck a chord. Fleming had 200 stickers in stock on the first day; within 24 hours she had orders for 432 stickers and she’d already raised more than $1,000. In the midst of the hectic Christmas season, Fleming was filling and shipping hundreds of orders a day, selling stickers in her downtown gallery and ordering more from her supplier.

“Stickers really did go everywhere,” she said. “I had people come into the store and buy them and tell me they were sending stickers overseas. Everybody could pitch in and be a part of something and do something good.”

Fleming credits the town of Custer and enthusiasm on social media for the fundraiser’s success. “I did a little live video and the town of Custer shared it and that’s when it really took off. I compare (the fundraiser) to the way the fire burned; it was going and it just exploded,” Fleming said.

“The thing that was so cool for me was how many people participated. I just offered this way for people to help, and they were the ones that made it happen. It was so fantastic to be a part of it. … I think that’s the special thing about where we live. People come through and help everybody out.”

Fleming concluded the fundraiser Dec. 31. On Jan. 3, she sent a $7,000 check to the South Dakota Parks and Wildlife Foundation. The foundation will use the funds wherever they are most needed to aid fire recovery, she said.

The “I Love the Black Hills” sticker can still be purchased at blackhillsstickers.com, although no more proceeds will go toward fire recovery, Fleming said.

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA TV) – We have some of the most beautiful landscape in the country, from the plains to the hills.

Bonny Fleming, owner of Bonzeye Studio in Rapid City, shot this landscape photo titled “Road to the Pot of Gold”

Amateur photographers: Share your best landscape photo that was shot within the last 12 months (April 2016 to now). Please, this is nature so the photos must be as natural as possible, no photoshopping beyond basic cropping and tweaking the exposure.

After a week of submissions (April 10-17), we will open voting (April 17-23) to the general public. The amateur landscape photo with the most votes will be preserved as a metal print.

Bonny Fleming of Bonzeye Studio, 508 Sixth Street, Rapid City, will reproduce the winning image as a 12×18 metal print. Printed using dye sublimation process, the artwork is printed directly onto high-quality aluminum for a clean, lasting finish. Contemporary, vibrant and captivating pieces take on life-like depth and dimension for an impressive display that stands the test of time. Finished with a durable metal-hanging bracket gives the piece an appearance it’s floating ¾” from the wall.

Bonny Fleming is a photographer and digital artist in the Black Hills.  Her work includes landscapes and wildlife of the Black Hills and Badlands.

Think of a stand of ponderosa pine trees silhouetted against the vivid layered colors of a Black Hills sunset, or a lone bighorn sheep atop steep snow-filled gullies of the Badlands, or a close-up of a coiled prairie rattlesnake about to strike.  

Her digital art includes composites of thousands of photos she has taken over the years that fill the space inside an animal.  There is a raven that includes images of Yellowstone Lake, and a buffalo with a jagged ridge of pine trees that make up the arch of back, and a butterfly that includes images of a lightning bolt and the blue sky.  

Some of her time lapse videos of swirling Black Hills super cell thunderstorms have been picked up by major TV networks after going viral on the internet.

Fleming is now switching gears, from doing her art to running a downtown gallery in Rapid City that features her work and a few other Black Hills artists.

She sat down with SDPB’s Charles Michael Ray to talk about the intersection of being an artist and running a business.    

A local woman first fell in love with photography at age 12 ,and says she’s never really set the camera down since.

For the past few years she’s sold her work at craft shows and *other people’s* galleries.

But in a couple weeks she plans the grand opening of her own small gallery, ‘A Long the Way” in her hometown of Rapid City.

Bonny Fleming uses her camera like a poet uses words.

Fleming says, “What I try to take pictures of is the stuff that I can’t believe I’m looking at.”

She works full time doing graphic design and spends her free time pursuing what she’s loved since childhood.

Bonny Fleming says, “For me it’s the excuse to sort of blow those things off a little bit and run off and play and be out in the world and see what it has to show me.”

Born in Deadwood, she says she moved to Rapid City around age 5.

Bonny Fleming says, “I realized that being outside and seeing what’s out there is what makes me happy, a beautiful sunset or a cool thunderstorm or watching some buffalo, or even the way the grass looks.”

Bonny with an eye for moments: equals Bonzeye Photography.

Bonny Fleming says, “I’ve figured out there’s 9 ways out of Rapid City and so the challenge is, you know, which way out of Rapid City you’re gonna go. And the reality is, you know you’re gonna find whatever adventure you find when you go down that road, and every other road is gonna have it own adventures that you’re gonna have to let go of.”

Every picture has it’s own life story.

Fleming says, ” One of them looks just exactly like that mom buffalo is kissing that baby buffalo.”

“Looking up when you’re inside a teepee without the outside on and I just looked up and I couldn’t believe how beautiful the clouds looked and the way it contrasted with the poles,” says Fleming.

Fleming says, “I have this rattle snake and it kinda jars you but I think people like that because that emotion is transferred from me to them through looking at the photograph.”

Or the time she caught a rainbow and lightning at the same time.

Fleming says, “And I got out and it was still raining and I lifted up the hatch of my truck so I could get my tripod under it and try to stay as dry as possible and just shot and shot and shot”

Her imagination, her way of seeing the world, is not limited to one picture at a time.

Bonny Fleming says, “These are new things I’m doing. I’m calling it the Synthesis Series. What I’m doing is I’m stacking my photography on top of my photography. I’ve called it painting with photography.”

Steve says: Combining her photos to create a single image that somehow simply blends into one.

“You put a forest on a buffalo’s back and all of a sudden it looks like fur. Or, you know, I put this waterfall down this butterfly wing and it just fit in this odd way,” she says.

Even her Gallery embraces her view of the world, a Raven photo topped by a black hat, or a lamp wearing a scarf.

Fleming says, “If there’s a way to change the world so simply as showing people how you see it, you know, that’s what I want. And for them to know it’s for sale,” she says with a laugh.

If you’ve met someone cool “Along the way”, please e–mail or call us with your story ideas.

She just recently filed for a Federal Tax ID: which means officially transitioning her hobby into a business.

Her official gallery grand opening is set for May 15th.

After that: until business grows, her little gallery behind 616 West Street, will be open by appointment only.

A South Dakota photographer’s video of a swirling storm over Black Hawk on Monday is making the rounds online.

Bonny Fleming and her boyfriend saw the sky getting dark and knew the coming storm would be picture worthy.

“We had just got done mowing the yard and saw this storm brewing so we ran over there,” Fleming said.

The couple, using smartphone apps to track the storm, drove from Rapid City to Black Hawk to get into position to capture shots of the storm that was starting to drop 4-inch hail and heavy rain. Fleming said after getting to the location 10 storm chasers arrived.

“There were all these guys with fancy gear and I tied my cellphone to my tripod with a hair tie,” she said.

Fleming started the time-lapse function on her iPhone, capturing the storm’s movements as it sat and spun for about half an hour.

“There was a lot of speculation that it was going to put a tornado down,” she said. “It was right over Black Hawk which was quite terrifying for everyone who lives down there.”

What is that exactly?

Brad Temeyer, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Sioux Falls, said the storm seen in the video is a mesocyclone, also known as a supercell thunderstorm. During the video Temeyer said a cloud can be seen forming on the right of the storm indicating it was reingesting the rain that was falling.

The thin cloud that formed on the bottom of the storm was a wall cloud.

“That would be a precursor to a storm that produces a tornado,” he said. “It was pretty close. You could see it was rotating in the time-lapse pretty well.”

After posting the video and photos of the storm on Facebook and Instagram, the storm became a viral sensation, with the video netting 120,000 views and more than 3,800 shares on Facebook as of Tuesday morning.

Fleming, who is a professional photographer and owns Bonzeye Photography, said she’s been contacted by news outlets all over the country including NBC, CBS, Reuters and the Good Morning America show.

“It’s neat. It’s what you want when you’re putting yourself out there as an artist. It’s amazing how fast it was,” she said.

The supercell began to develop north of Rapid City around 5 p.m. local time, but even two hours later the storm hadn’t moved more than five or six miles. Mid-level winds over western South Dakota were weak, and there wasn’t enough oomph in the atmosphere to push the storm downwind.

The parked storm caused huge rainfall totals of 2 to 5 inches (flood warnings are still in effect for creeks in the area) and very large hail up to 4.5 inches in diameter. It also allowed storms chasers were able to sit back and watch a beautiful supercell spin — something that often doesn’t happen while scouring the great wide Plains for severe weather.

“It was a photographer’s dream,” said weather.com’s Jonathan Erdman.

Our own Ian Livingston has been storm chasing for over a week now and was in South Dakota on Monday.

“We knew storms were likely in western South Dakota, but there was some uncertainty as to where they would form,” Ian said. “We positioned in Sturgis to keep northwest South Dakota and the Rapid City area both in play. The HRRR [a high-resolution, short term forecast model] really liked the northwest part of the state, but the Black Hills acts as a convergence zone and a source of lift. It’s very typical for supercells to fire off them and move east.”

It turns out his team was in great position since this storm was the only game in town Monday night.

“The supercell storm eventually popped late day once enough instability gathered to fully break the cap,” Ian said. “A number of others formed in the same location and didn’t mature. The core [of the storm] actually ended up drifting west-southwest into the hills which is fairly unusual. An outflow boundary from the south eventually hit it and helped kill it off by cutting off the moisture.”

Dan McKemy, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service, captured the photo above as well as this stunning timelapse of the storm. It really does just linger on the other side of the hill as it ingests copious amounts of moist air. You can see the moist inflow form what meteorologists call a “beaver’s tail” (because that’s actually what it looks like) on the right side of the storm.

605 Magazine

I’ve had a camera in my hands since I was 12. My mom let me use her SLR on a trip to Yellowstone, and I never really gave it back. I’ve always been shooting, and my photos were always good. It wasn’t until the last five or six years, though, that I really started to make it a (pro)thing.

A new piece of work in Rapid City’s Art Alley involves 30 different artists on one mural.

Each artist received part of the image and a one square foot tile.  They then reproduced that image on their own– in the end the tiles were put together like a puzzle.

The result is one picture–done by 30 different artists.  The collaboration is called “Part of the Whole.”

SDPB’s Charles Michael Ray has today’s Dakota Digest.
 

Not only can this provide huge exposure internationally, but it also offers the overall winner $10,000 and a trip to National Geographics headquarters in Washington, plus winning photographs in each of the three categories will be published in National Geographic magazine.

The contest ends November 30th, so time is severely running out if you are considering entering.

Below are some images from the entries so far.

“You see, it’s like a faucet” Bonny Fleming says, pushing her long dark hair out of her face and gesturing with her hands as though she is saying something of immense importance. “If it’s not running, I feel like I’m going to explode.”

She’s talking about her drive to create, the thing that has pushed her to achieve so much at such a young age. Back in 2009, at the ripe old age of 29, Bonny was named by the Rapid City Journal as a visionary for the city. And for good reason. Even as one of the youngest people on the list, Bonny had already established herself as an important presence in the community – the creative community in particular. She’d hosted concerts, organized fundraisers, created and hosted a film festival… She’d even helped design and construct multiple haunted houses in the area.

(Read the rest of this story in the Spring ’13 FACES)