As a photographer, I do what feels natural to me.  I am a photographer showing you where I have been led and what turned me on from what I was shown.

       Traditional landscapes, I photograph water.  Falling.  Cascading.  Rushing.  Moving.  Water is life.  When it is still, it’s stagnant – dead.  Life is motion and that is what I love to photograph. What has more life, more motion, more symbolism, and more power than water? Nothing survives without water. Water cleanses not only the body, but also the soul.

       I look for modulations in the light or tonal densities and color contrasts. Many of the photographs that I like most are where a near object is literarily 18” from the lens.  I like that “in your face” aspect of a very close subject.  This adds a tremendous amount of depth to the image.  At the same time I look for the compression of space that a longer telephoto lens adds to a more distant view.  I also like how the longer lens isolates by exclusion.  In my work I use a field view camera that uses 4”x5” size slide film.  I hike with almost 40 lbs of photo equipment on my back looking for the compositions that move my eye around and into the yet invisible frame.

       In many of these images, I have had to use up to 36 minutes of exposure for a single picture. These extended exposure times create a motion in the water, ferns, leaves and trees that the human eye cannot see, the human brain cannot imagine, but only through the photographic medium can it be revealed.  It is this unknowing revelation that is to come that partly draws me to photograph water.  Every image is different, because the water is constantly moving and shifting in its flow pattern that it can never be predicted or photographed exactly the same ever again.  Water can appear as long strands that fingers itself around the each rock or log in its path.  It could transform itself into touchable mounds of liquid clouds.  A photograph of moving water gives a magical form to a living entity that has no stable form.  I always stand amazed at the sight of water.  Photography is the only artistic medium that allows us to see the beautiful rhythmic dance of motion.

       I am a color landscape photographer who prints on traditional color paper from digital files.

       I expose film, scan it at high resolution settings, then I use Photoshop to produce an image that used to take several days to produce with extensive and extreme masking controls.  I strive to create clarity in separation of color hues and saturations and in the contrast range that allows all of the tones of the images that needs to be revealed, revealed.  I do not composite several images together.  It is a single image that was created with precise control over camera settings and exposure & development.  Walk with me and you would see the scene that you are viewing in any of these photographs.For knowing more about the stories, go here.