Introduction — Why I Kept Returning

I started photography when I was twelve years old.

My father had a darkroom. That was the beginning. Black and white film, trays, chemicals, and the slow emergence of an image under dim light. He taught me how to see in terms of light and shadow, and how to wait for an image to reveal itself—not just in the developer, but out in the world. That process never really left me.

I’ve never stopped looking for photographs.

Over the years, there was always a camera nearby. Different tools at different times—a 4×5 view camera, 35mm, 6×7 medium format. Each one changed how I worked. Slower, more deliberate with film. More precise with larger formats. Every step forced me to think more carefully about composition, exposure, and timing.

I moved into digital early, when the technology was still uncertain. One of the first cameras I used was the Canon RC-701. It was limited by today’s standards, but that didn’t matter. It confirmed something I already understood—the camera is just a tool. The act of seeing is what matters.

That progression has continued. The equipment has changed. The process has evolved. The current camera I use, a Fujifilm GFX 100, offers a level of detail I could not have imagined early on. But the intent is the same as it was in the darkroom: find the image, simplify it, and make it last.

What never changed was where I felt pulled to work.

The outdoors was always the constant—climbing, skiing, hiking. The landscape became the subject not because I chose it, but because I kept returning to it. Mountains, forests, desert, and coastline. Washington State provided all of it, and I spent decades moving through it, often alone, covering thousands of miles each year.

There wasn’t a single destination. It was a pattern—go out, look, wait, return, and go again.

Some images came easily. Most did not. Conditions rarely aligned. Light didn’t cooperate. Locations didn’t always deliver. But over time, the process became the point. Not just capturing a place, but understanding how it changes—by season, by weather, by time of day, and by patience.

This is not a record of everywhere I’ve been.

It is a selection of what stayed with me.

Sixty years of looking reduces down to something simpler: light, form, and timing. The same elements I learned at the beginning, standing in a darkroom, watching an image slowly come into view.

This is my collection of images from thousands that represent a study of light. Looking for patterns—being drawn to light that cuts through darkness, creates form, or light that fills a space completely.