Thinking About Photography

I’ve had similar experiences in my travels over the last ten years since I left the corporate world and have spent a lot of time exploring. Some places I’ve been to repeatedly (eight times to Iceland and three times to Mongolia and countless times to Yosemite) others only once (Japan, Brazil, the Galapagos, Norway, Germany). But all these places represent Home to me in their own ways. Travel has greatly enriched my life and my understanding of the people who share the planet with us. I am often humbled by how their life experience differs from mine.  Imagine being a Mongolian nomad living on the steppe where winter temperatures easily get to minus 40 and worse when it’s windy.  I’ve had a small taste of that. I also stood in the middle of the Gobi Desert on a summer night when there was nothing but starlight and the light from our campfire. That was the first time I experienced 180 degrees of stars from horizon to horizon. On several occasions, I have also stood in awe of mother nature watching the aurora borealis dance across the skies in Iceland. Also in Iceland, I witnessed the rare stranding of a pod of pilot whales. We were helpless and could only bear witness to one of Nature’s heart-breaking realities as the whales were in their death throes. I crave experiences like these and attempt to capture them to the best of my abilities as photographs and short films. My dad built me my first darkroom when I was 12. In 2020 I built what I expect to be my last darkroom 50 years later. It happens to be located just a few miles from where the likes of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams made beautiful iconic photographs at the Oceano Dunes.