It was an email out of the blue, says Livingston, Montana-based wildlife and nature photographer Tom Murphy. The United States Postal Service reached out to see if he might have a photo of a bison they could feature on a commemorative U.S. stamp.

He forwarded a couple dozen of his favorites, but they weren’t quite right, he says. They wanted a profile of the animal that showed the full shape of its body. Murphy sent along a second set of options. The USPS immediately selected an image of a young bull he’d photographed in 2008 in Hayden Valley, Yellowstone National Park, with a Nikon D2X camera and a 200-400mm lens. “They loved it. It’s simple. It’s graphic. It’s against the sky, so the background is perfectly clean,” Murphy explains. “And [the bison] is standing in some grass. They really liked that little line of grass along the bottom.”

The photo also works well with an image of a vintage 1923, 30-cent stamp featuring an etching of a bison that was overlaid onto Murphy’s photo. “They converted [my image] to sepia,” he says, “so it’s kind of like an old photograph, too, which is cool.” He was paid a fee for the use of the image and is honored that his work was selected.

What does it feel like to have your work printed on commemorative U.S. stamp? Kind of odd, Murphy laughs, but gratifying. “When I was a little kid, I collected postage stamps because I thought they were little works of art,” he says. “So, it’s kind of cool, you know, that 15 million of mine are going to be little works of art.”  

Amanda Arnold is a senior editor.