Having traveled around the world to many places and dozens of countries, I am the type of person who loves to explore! The allure of venturing to somewhere new for the first time is one that simply lights my spirit on fire and really has a way on making my mind wander.  As many of you know each place has its own magic and every destination has its way of immersing you into a sensory overload of incredible experiences that seemingly define the beings that we are.

Culturally speaking, travel can be its own reward unto itself. With so many varying people all over the world, living their own ways and adopting means to interpret their realities in a fashion much different than our own.  I believe that travel has in many ways opened my mind up to so much and at the same time allowed me to realize what an incredible place I call home!

North America and North American landscapes, culture and dynamic are unbounded. Getting in your vehicle for a long road trip is like visiting many different countries without a passport!  From temperate rainforests, high deserts, towering mountains that rival any of the world’s alps to Sonoran Desert landscapes and the deepest canyons in existence!  North American Landscapes hold about as much unexplored beauty and majesty as any place that I could ever dare attempt to compare.

Don’t get me wrong, I love going abroad as much as the next person! However, I would be remiss if I were to ignore the fact that adventures in my back yard are among my absolute favorite! One of the benefits to exploring something familiar is that I am really able to understand the land and what stage it is in.  I am able to know how much rain or snow falls, how the vegetation states are set for spring and wildflower blooms, floods, rare events and tough to capture Photographs that are on my bucket list to attempt!  I notice that I really strategize my seasons much more and focus diligently on capturing raw and rare moments afield.

A fun story was my recent twelve-year quest to capture a super bloom of bee weed in the sandy soil of the South West desert!  I had been lightly following rumors of this event for the last fifteen years when I first saw photographs of the phenomena.  It wasn’t until I began to learn about how rare it was that I began to really pay attention to it. It was after tracking post winter moisture and spring rainstorms for over a decade that I actually had a chance to see it firsthand in all its glory!  Let me say that had I not grown a wonderful group of passionate friends who also love these rare moments, and had I not actually lived here, this would be a near impossible feat to accomplish.  After it was all said and done, I am already anticipating its return one day and hopeful that I am once again able to see it bloom as I have so many other ideas as to how I would like to go about shooting the perfect Landscape Photograph of the scene!  I am not sure if you are like me or not, however, the first time is like a test period.  You go out, explore and photograph it in as many ways as you possibly are able, then once it is all over and you’re back home looking through everything you had just captured, you see ways that you would have liked to shoot it.  Hindsight is always 20/20, right? As Far as the photographs, sure, I really captured some great shots! However, there’s always next time and should I be so lucky, I will see these flowers bloom again within the next fifteen years!

North American Landscape Photography has in many ways molded my ethos and created the artist I am today.  As part adventurer and part artist, the pursuit of the perfect light in combination with the perfect conditions is one that has me traversing the highest ridges of the Rocky Mountains to the lowest parts of the desert below sea level in Death Valley! I simply love the dramatic nature of the land and the varied terrain that comes with being immersed in North American Landscape.

There are very few places on earth where one can get in a well-supplied vehicle and visit four-hundred-foot redwoods with giant waves crashing across towering sea stacks and a few hours later be in a desolate landscape with huge and gravity defying saguaro cactus shooting up into the sky.  The sheer diversity of compositions and features are literally endless and can supply a full time Photographer with an absolute lifetime of artistic, creative opportunity!

One pursuit that dives me like no other is chasing storms over dramatic vistas!  Let me say that North America has that and so much more.  I rarely ever have much of a plan. Plans are a Landscape Photographers worst nightmare.  The weather doesn’t care much for our plans, the weather simply happens when it happens and as such I simply plan to not plan. North America, especially out West has some of the most wild and incredible weather in the world! With snowy winters, blistering summers consumed by monsoonal thunderstorms and lightshows that accompany it in a boundless array of color, the American West is a place that exemplifies what is possible when shooting Landscape Photography!

I am most often seen frantically gathering my gear last minute and shooting out the door on some last-ditch effort to catch a rare event somewhere within a twenty-hour drive of my front door!  These last-minute trips without hesitation, fuel me and create even more wanderlust in my heart. I love driving through the night or all day to see something wild occur in nature! Last light and wild colors stretching across the horizon and light illuminating the tips of some giant peaks of a distant mountain range!  I often wish I was able to be a thousand places at once as I scurry about attempting to find that one perfect spot to capture epic light before it slips away as quickly as it came. Then after everything has fallen silent, sitting there in the dark all alone, wondering if I got the shot or not only to think to myself in this quiet place “What am I doing out here”?  At times after these wild long drives to places unknown, I feel half-crazy but most often I simply feel more alive and fulfilled than ever before!

North American Landscape Photography has taken me to places I otherwise would never have thought to travel to.  Places so far off the beaten path in fact that there simply is no path and boot leather is the equity you must take stock in.  I always have loved the old adage that says the adventure begins where the trail ends.  Where the cacophony of voices fades away from the comforts of others and convenience only to be left with the thoughts of your own mind and that of woodland creatures, birds and an endless sky. Places that hold true magic in my eyes are ones that are simply a hike away and within reach of everyone but so unknown because of the fears that live within many that disallow any real adventure to start to begin with.  I love places that make your heart race with potentially death-defying traverses, country that is so big and steep that it challenges your innate fight or flight to engage. As we reach further into the depths of the wilderness to find ourselves, we reach further into the realms of who we are! Often times, we need not look much further than where we live to reveal these treasures and in reality, we often overlook things dismissing them as obvious but alas, they are there if we choose to look.

I for one still have many places in North America I have yet to explore, mountains to climb and deserts to wander.  The opportunity is beyond conception and that really excites me.  These simple truths encourage me to push further and go deeper! I am in awe of the earth’s majesty and North American Landscape Photography really does hold a significantly special place within my heart.  I feel that this is where I began to create, capture and define who I am as a Photographic Fine Artist and this is a place I will always look toward every time I wish to seek out something new.  There certainly isn’t a lack of places to go, it all lays in one’s desire to get out there and go somewhere that has never been gone before!

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