About Me

Me at the end of the Hole in the Rock Road in Escalante with Lake Powell in the background.

A landscape photography website. Finally!

Hi there!

In 1994 I had the opportunity to go to Australia for three months. About a year before leaving a photography friend who worked for the Chicago Tribune was visiting San Francisco and pointed to a book by landscape photographer Galen Rowell and told me to get it to learn more about landscape photography. I had bought my first real camera, a Nikon N-90 with a 35-70mm f2.8 lens.

So to get ready for the big trip, I read Rowell’s book and started doing pictures. I did two kinds of pictures: one was of friends partying in San Francisco and landscape pictures on my many road-trips to the Sierras. The first few rolls of film I shot were Kodachrome. I wish Kodachrome still existed. It was an amazing film for people pictures. Quickly I switched over to the truly amazing landscape photography film called Fuji Velvia.

Velvia was incredible in how it could make a scene look better on film than in real life. At first I couldn’t do this. Cloudy days were blue. Contrasty light was too much. But after awhile of doing pictures just before sunrise to about two minutes after sunrise, and just the opposite at sunset while using the Singh Ray graduated neutral density filters that costed WAY more that it seemed they should cost, I started making pictures that looked better on film than real life.

It was joyous to look at my pictures on the light table after a road-trip. The cost of the film, however, meant I could only shoot so many rolls per month. I think it was something like 20-25. The cost of film and road-trips meant less and less time partying with my friends.

The three month trip to Australia was transformative in my life. After returning I decided to become a photographer. The choice was: photojournalism or landscape? I chose photojournalism and became a newspaper photographer first in eastern Iowa and then in Bend, Oregon starting in 2000. The entire time doing the news I stayed doing landscape photography.

Now I do wedding, portrait and landscape photography.

I’ve never had a website dedicated to only landscape photography. There aren’t many pictures from the first few years of doing this style of photography. It takes awhile to make a picture look better than real life. I don’t do a ton of photoshopping of the pictures. My goal is to make them look like Velvia. The best pictures don’t need much help anyway. They look great straight out of the camera.

So enjoy the website. At first it won’t have any buy now buttons. I want to see how much traffic it sees before paying more money to get the buy now buttons set up and running. Contact me if you’re interested in hanging these on your wall and I will make it happen.

#ExplorerPhotography

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