About

Why I photograph

I am drawn to the beauty of nature and everyday experience; I strive for images that express the thoughts and feelings I had in the moment and hope they say something worthwhile to others who view them. Landscape, wildlife, birds, street photography, and the urban experience all interest me. Change is a theme that appears in much of my current work as I encounter the visual implications of a rapidly evolving world. I have also recently begun to experiment with images combining photography and digital imagery in ways that reimagine reality.

 My story

I've been making images of one kind or another for as long as I can remember. Over the years I've sketched, painted, and tried my hand at clay and cast metal, but photography is the medium I've always come back to. It's been the bedrock of my efforts to say something visually for well over 50 years now.

I started taking pictures in a college photojournalism class and ever since I've always had a camera close at hand. For years I shot film exclusively with a Leica rangefinder and two lenses that went with me everywhere, from the Arctic Slope of Alaska to mountain tops and distant cities. I finally switched entirely to digital in 2009 when Kodak announced it was discontinuing Kodachrome. Going digital meant giving up the thrill of watching a print emerge in a developing tray under the dim red light of a darkroom but I've come to appreciate the scope of expressive possibilities that working with Photoshop allows. I now do my own color prints instead of having to send film to a lab, and I've found that modern inkjet papers can produce the same rich blacks I loved so much with photographic paper. Printing technology has changed enormously in recent years. My large format Epson printer lets me print richly detailed images 44 inches wide and as long as I want.

Cameras come and go today. A film camera could last a career; digital cameras go obsolete in just a few years as sensor technology advances and new features get added to menus. I'm not sure this is such a good thing. Some of the most compelling images in the history of photography were shot with simple cameras no one would consider today. Look at the photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz from the early 1900s or the work of Paul Strand from that era and you'll see what I mean. With this said, I confess that I try to keep up with changes in technology that let me make larger images with better color and tonal range. Otherwise, I wish camera companies would stop making everything so ridiculously complex.