[1] Baer learned basic commercial photography in Chicago and honed his skills as a World War II United States Navy combat photographer.

Returning to civilian life, over the next few years he developed into "one of the foremost architectural photographers in the world,"[2] receiving important commissions from premier architects in post-war Central California.

In the early 1970s, influenced by a friendship with Edward Weston, Baer began to concentrate on his personal landscape art photography.

Baer soon found a dull but well-paying job in the advertising office of the Chicago department store Marshall Field's.

Dissatisfied, he apprenticed as a low-paid menial assistant, at a greatly reduced salary, to a Michigan Avenue commercial photography company.

Although he returned to Chicago, he already had applied for Art Center School while in San Francisco but his plans were derailed by the onset of World War II.

Accompanied by a writer, Baer covered military operations in North Africa, southern France, Brazil, and the Caribbean Sea.

[2] The two married and investing their dwindling funds, established a commercial photography business in a small store-front studio in Carmel in 1946.

In dire need of competent photographers to illustrate their projects, builders and architects vied to hire the Baer team.

The more noted among them earlier had formed Group f/64 in San Francisco; its members included Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, and Henry Swift, among others.

[4][8] Finding attractive work opportunities in the San Francisco area in the early fifties, the Baers sold their house on Carmelo Avenue in Carmel and re-located to Berkeley.

Baer rapidly became a sought-after architectural photographer for noted architects, including Craig Edwards, the firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), Charles Willard Moore, and William Turnbull Jr.[10] Baer's photographs of buildings by Bernard Maybeck, Greene and Greene, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Julia Morgan are considered important today in understanding American architecture and design in the first half of the 20th century.

Through the influence of Nathaniel A. Owings, SOM hired Baer to photograph US consulate buildings being constructed throughout Western Europe.

These photographs led to Baer's first one-man exhibition at San Francisco's M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in 1959 and his first published portfolio.

He contributed work for the 1965 Sierra Club publication Not Man Apart, which also included entries from artists such as Robinson Jeffers, Dorothea Lange, and Beaumont Newhall.

The dynamic juxtaposition of photographs and poetry combined to reveal, in a mild paraphrasing of Karman, "much about the meaning and mystery of the world".

[13] In 1965, the Baers built a second home and studio, designed by Bay Area Modernist architect William Wurster, south of Carmel near the Big Sur coast with dramatic shore and ocean views.

Unfortunately, Frances never felt comfortable in the Stone House, feeling it cold, damp, and isolated and continued to live in Berkeley while Morley used the Garrapata residence as his combination home and studio.

The remote coastal location brought Baer into intimate contact with the primal natural elements of wind, water, light, and rocks at the cliffs and beach, an environment in which he did much of his best work.

[16] He teamed with Augusta Fink, the biographer of Mary Austin, to produce a synergistic combination of prose and photography into a paean to the Western landscape.

Their separate but personal photographic visions and techniques centered around careful composition of the subject matter, complete familiarity with their equipment and materials, and dedication to the art and profession of photography.

[17] Although devoted partners, the Baers were intense mutual competitors and had an arrangement for 'artistic rights' to a potential photograph discovered while driving the countryside – as Frances recounts in her chapter, "Rules of the Road" in 'California Plain'.

[2] After fifty years of usage the Ansco had become almost an extension of his mind and eye; he could adjust its settings by feel alone while under his darkcloth and concentrating on his subject in the ground glass viewer.

[13] With his camera on one shoulder, and the carrying case in the opposite hand, he was perfectly laterally balanced as he strode towards the subject of his photograph.

Although owning a Navy surplus Saltzman 8x10 enlarger,[23] he rarely used it since contact prints were his preferred medium of expression – it's now a prized possession of one of his last assistants.

With his varied Navy photography experience, his many years of study, and intimate knowledge of his equipment, materials and darkroom techniques, Baer was well-qualified to take on any photographic assignment that came along.

Film negatives that Baer felt represented his most significant work were given to the Special Collections of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In his insightful and scholarly Introduction in "Stones of the Sur", he captures the magnetic attraction of the magnificent wild coastline for both Jeffers and Baer.

Like Jeffers, living on the edge of the continent, he was attuned to an order and a scale of existence beyond the human; he sought to document the sublime beauty, alien and austere at times, of the natural world, especially that portion ... he encountered in his beloved Big Sur.

He and his photographic assistant eagerly participated with the students, with Baer speculating on how he was viewing his subject and how he'd eventually create a printable negative.