About Me

Formative Years

I was drawn to the arts from an early age.

I was the kind of kid who drew homemade cards that I then gave to my grandmother while she was visiting.

I enjoyed looking at the panels of heroes and villains fighting epic battles in the comic books I read more than the accompanying words.

I learned a bit of trumpet and piano while in grammar school. I also wrote creatively an awful lot.

All of this marinated for decades as I went from high school to university and then to job after job that only tangentially touched upon these passions if at all.

Awakening

I came to photography through a convergence of moments while in graduate school that reshaped who I am.

Very talented friends in my cohort put together an informal group to work through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

We aimed to rediscover the creativity that we had lost as social media bombarded us with messages about how we should view life, as we struggled with our mountains of coursework, and as we taught our students the fundamentals of critical thinking and good writing.

Things took off for me when we got to the book’s fourth chapter.

We’re asked not to read anything—including and especially social media and email—for a week, so that we can empty ourselves of the things distracting us from creating art.

I used “reading deprivation week” to try out a bunch of different things. I drew portraits. I wrote poetry. I cooked. And I played around with the camera on my smart phone.

I was hooked pretty quickly.

Photography not only gave me a creative outlet to almost instantly share arresting scenes of the world around me with friends and colleagues and to develop a discerning eye for what captures imaginations.

It also got me out of my head.

I bought my first dedicated camera body, a canon EOS Rebel XSi / 450D that I still own, soon afterwards.

Behind the Lens

A few common themes inform my work.

Dramatic skies are the most obvious.

I am especially attracted to fog. It has a way of stripping a scene down to its essentials.

Fog also lends a feeling of mystery and intrigue to things we might otherwise overlook without a second glance.

I’m also a big fan of bodies of water.

Clouds or autumn colors reflected on the serene surface of a mountain lake, rivers tumbling over stony rock beds and cascading down falls, or waves breaking against the shore speak to me of the unstoppable power of nature.

And of all the different kinds of shapes the world takes as well as of the emotions these elicit in us when are near nature.

I love moody compositions, and that comes out strongly in my best work.

For me, compelling images convey some kind of emotion. They invite us to wrestle with our feelings.

Photos that are edgy or ambiguous, that balance the darker values in frame against the lighter ones that often take center stage, naturally lend themselves to this.

Why I do Landscape Photography

I see my role as a landscape photographer as capturing the stories that the earth tells us.

Doing so isn’t always easy.

For one thing, we as a species have largely been conditioned to hyper focus our attention on what we do in our work lives and what we can spend our money on.

For another, the world at large is well, rather large, and it is filled with an overwhelming amount of stuff to look at.

Put another way, the planet’s geography is far too big and noisy to include very much in a single frame.

What I do is select visual elements in the landscape and eliminate others. I find seams in the terrain and use angles to direct my viewer’s gaze where I want.

When done right, it’s a kind of beautiful interaction with the world around us. A dialogue and play that allows us to make a connection to the land we otherwise might not have.

Through each photo I share then, I am inviting you to explore all that our world has to offer and to reconnect deeply with it.