Horizons Fall Photography Speaker

At the age of eighteen I discovered the transformational power of the natural world, an event which forever altered the trajectory of my life. Backpacking, mountaineering, and world travel soon became impulses I had little desire to suppress. The transformative impact these adventures and experiences had on my life, as well as my personal worldview, was not only profound, but molded my life into something unimaginable to my childhood self. For this alone I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the natural world. It seems impossible, perhaps even painful, to wonder where my life would be right now if it wasn’t for my relationship with nature.

Becoming a photographer was not a linear journey. I never consciously decided to pick up a camera to create. Rather, as I continued to use a camera to document my experiences backpacking and traveling, a curiosity slowly crept in: How can I create images which reflect the power, beauty, and magic I witnessed in nature? Is it possible for an image to convey some small measure of nature’s transformative power? I began studying composition, camera technique, acquired a few mantras by reading Galen Rowell, bought a good film camera with a few lenses, then hopped a plane to the Himalayas. It was there in the rarified air, surrounded by Earth’s highest mountains, that my passion for nature and landscape photography was cemented. The images I came home with exceeded anything I could have imagined. That journey was over twenty years ago. Since then my passion for photography, first lit in the Himalayas, has shown few signs of dimming.

In the intervening years I continued to explore, backpack, and climb in the Cascade Range of Washington and Oregon, spent a year living and traveling in South America, and trekked through legendary ranges in Patagonia, Nepal, Tibet, and Peru. More recently my photography has focused on the incredible nature found in my beloved Pacific Northwest, as well as the alien geography of the desert Southwest. Photographing these adventures was an important aspect of each experience. Wherever I traveled I kept a camera in hand, taking thousands of images which aimed to convey the magical moments that inevitably occur while moving through Earth's most magnificent landscapes. This quest has proven to be every bit as exciting, humbling, and satisfying as climbing a peak in the Cascades or visiting some distant land previously known only in my imagination. The best trips are always the next trips and the best images are the ones I don’t know yet exist. Personal exploration and discovery hold a magic all their own.