Welcome, and thank you for having a look at my photographic art. I’d like to introduce you to the natural world I know. Come follow along on my journey. Explore, consider, and take something with you. This is nature through my eyes. These photographs do not arise from any particular desire to see the world through a lens, but rather from my deep passion for this land we call wilderness. It has shaped every aspect of my life. I wish to show you the amazing, beautiful and powerful forces that have created the Earth we live on.
Through these photographs, I express my feelings for the locations I visit and the wonders of nature that I encounter along the way. With these photographs, I attempt to bring my experiences in wild Earth to the viewer.
To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. — Elliott Erwitt
We are well into a new and exciting generation of photography that is incredibly more limitless than ever before. I embrace this new generation. The digital age allows us to overcome many of the technical challenges that confounded ways of communicating such experiences to you by photographers in the past. It is an exciting time to be landscape artist. It is a time that enables my creativity and my ability to express my experiences in nature to you more deeply than ever before.
Even in the hands of a master, a camera alone will never capture Nature as we can observe it with all of our senses. My goal is to illustrate the rich experiences I have had in this multidimensional world as best as I can within the limits of this two-dimensional medium. Although I generally don’t add or remove anything significant from my images, there is never an absolute definition of what I saw in the image, to begin with. How we see is a very personal thing. To this point, I believe a great photograph is not merely documenting the scene at hand, rather it is about fusing the essential vision of the artist with the landscape.
I believe the most important quality of a photograph, as in all of the art, is to evoke an emotional response. While everything in nature does this for me, selecting just the right places and moments to make a photograph that conveys those emotions is far more difficult. My camera is one of the tools I use to achieve my final results, the images you see here. No one tool is perfect, however, and no one tool can make a great artist. My processes involve meticulous attention to detail in my field technique, along with work in today’s digital darkroom to fine tune, optimize and adjust contrasts, colors, tonalities, luminosity, etc. in an attempt to better present to you the experience I felt in being there myself.
It is an exciting process, and above all, a way for me to do what I love most, exploring the wilderness and capturing it for you to see. Without wilderness, I would never have begun taking pictures.
I want you to know just how undeniably precious these lands are in their preservation. We NEED wilderness; now more than ever. The wilderness experience becomes ever more important to balance our lives as we become more industrialized and therefore bound within our own creations. This is because there exists within it a deep connection, unlike anything that can be found in today’s intense world of instantly manufactured gratification. There is a certain freedom that comes only when we are immersed in the natural world. I come to the wilderness to experience something much greater than ourselves, and I hope you will too.