Cruising in a single-engine Cessna at 3,000 feet over a patchwork landscape of small woodlots and family farms in Tioga County, Garth Lentz and Bob Keller discussed the ethics and economies of eating.

Both men agreed that the small farms below them need to be sustained and that royalties from the Marcellus Shale drilling leases evident on the landscape were an insufficient long-term solution for keeping small farms viable.

“You can see the way these shale gas developments are right side by side some of the most beautiful and some of the last small family farms left in the nation,” Lentz said. “It’s a landscape and culture and tradition that’s disappearing. The higher goal should be, ‘Let’s find a way to keep small family farms going on the value of selling that food.’ There are so many supports for oil and gas and not for small farms.”

Lentz, an award-winning Canadian photographer, and Keller, an American pilot and flight instructor with experience over several continents, are members of a team of international photographers who have been scouring the Chesapeake Bay watershed, capturing images of how the Susquehanna River and the people who live along it interact.

Life in the Chesapeake is connected to life on small farms in the northern tier by a strong, steady stream of water.

From kids kayaking past the Rockville Bridge to brook trout darting through the clear pools of Slate Run, the photographic project reveals the Susquehanna running deep through Pennsylvania culture.

“Pennsylvanians have the strongest family structure I’ve seen in this country,” said Miguel Angel de la Cueva, a Mexican photographer who shot both the joy of a family playing in the river near Sunbury and the arresting orange of acid mine drainage.

“This place is incredibly rich culturally, artistically ... but it has a very dark history, too,” de la Cueva said. “The Chesapeake is where everything started. It’s like looking at the root of the country. The history of the use of the Chesapeake Bay is the history of many other countries. That’s why it’s of importance to the international community.”

This is the first time the International League of Conservation Photographers has launched a project of this sort, known as a RAVE, on the East Coast.

Previous RAVEs — Rapid Assessment Visual Expeditions — focused on places such as Equatorial Guinea in Africa, the Patagonian region of Chile and the Yucatan in Mexico.

The photographers’ job: to produce a comprehensive portrait of a conservation issue in a matter of days or weeks.

In this case, it’s to capture “both the natural beauty and the environmental tragedies of the bay watershed,” said Kelly Donaldson of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

The photographers, all volunteers and all National Geographic caliber, worked 16-hour days, traveling hundreds of miles to distill the essence of life and its connection to water.

Their work will go on display later this month in Washington, D.C., in support of amendments to the Clean Water Act.

Those amendments would “ensure that all the states of the bay watershed develop and implement detailed plans to achieve pollution reduction targets for nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment by 2025,” Donaldson said, “and would authorize much-needed funding to help cities, towns and farmers comply with the law.”

If past RAVEs are any guide, the photos taken in Pennsylvania could have a powerful effect on legislators.

Images can speak louder, and more eloquently, than lobbyists, editorials or scientific reports.

“Images have an incredible power to profoundly affect people,” said Neil Ever Osborne, a Toronto photographer who has done underwater photography of sea turtles, manatees and wild salmon. “I don’t think the world at large or the scientific community really know how powerful [images] can be.”

Osborne has interviewed experts in conservation photography, including Jane Goodall, and his film on the subject will premiere in London this fall.

Osborne spent much of his time in Pennsylvania wet and cold.

With the help of Peter Petokas of Lycoming College, Osborne went in search of a “wicked looking creature” called a hellbender, the third-largest aquatic salamander in the world.

“The hellbender is a poster child for everything that we’ve done wrong in the watershed,” Petokas told Osborne. “It is in serious jeopardy of disappearing from the Susquehanna River basin. It was once thought to be widespread throughout the basin, but today it appears to be restricted to just three tributaries of the Susquehanna.”

The human element — the people and culture of Pennsylvania — figures prominently in the photographers’ work.

Amish farmers picking tobacco, well drillers shouldering 90-foot sections of pipe, acid mine activists, children splashing in the summer sun, fishermen and kayakers are all connected.

“We are connected to the environment, to the wildlife and streams, and we always will be,” Osborne said. This project will “show Washington what is available, what they have, what they could lose and some changes they can make.”

Offering perspectives from the air, from under water or from the ground, “We can definitely say we brought the entire watershed to D.C.”