My photography is an expression of my intimate and life-long connection to nature.  My worldview has evolved over time and, like lots of people who live and work in wild places, I’m convinced that everything — animals, plants, water, places, and the earth herself — possess a unique and recognizable spirit and that we are all inescapably interconnected and more alike than different. We are all earthlings, we all share a common origin, and we have evolved over the millennia to work as a system, how different could we be? We need each other if we hope to thrive rather than simply survive. A couple hundred years ago people didn’t have the knowledge to prove that, though many felt it intuitively. Today, we don’t have any excuses. The ephemeral quality of nature and natural light means that no matter how many times I visit a place I’ll never see the same scene twice.  My objective as a photographer is to combine my experience and training as both a naturalist and an artist to freeze those fleeting images of nature that excite me and clearly reveal the spirit of my subjects.  I usually try to visualize the final print before making an exposure and will work with a subject until I feel I have the image I pictured in my mind. Sometimes my vision doesn’t exist in the scene as it is the day I’m there. So, if I am really excited about the possibilities, I return to that subject in different light, seasons, and weather conditions to see as many of its aspects and moods as I can, searching for the combinations that seem to me to best capture the spirit of the place. When I’m making photographs of natural subjects and landscapes I try to avoid including anything that shows the hand of man, although that gets more difficult every day! Because of my long association with and love of film, and the consequent years spent sorting slides and working in the darkroom, my approach to processing images is comparable whether the image is captured on a digital sensor or on film. I work to bring out those elements that caused me to make the photograph in the first place and to express the quality, color, and/or tonal range of light I visualized at the moment I tripped the shutter. For me, the final product of photography is a print. Only in printing a photograph can my artistic vision and intent be shared. My photographs are "straight" images, I refrain from adding or taking significant elements away digitally. If the sky in one of my prints seems unbelievable, it was undoubtedly better when I released the shutter. That said, I don’t generally feel bad about deleting litter if I can’t pick it up before making the shot. I am very saddened and concerned that so many of Earth’s beautiful spirits are threatened, endangered or simply gone forever due to human’s thoughtless impacts on our planet. I believe that we should respect our planet and all of its inhabitants and that we humans have greatly overstepped our place in the world. Time is literally running out for us to come together and affect the change necessary to heal our planet before the damage we have caused and continue to inflict becomes irreversible, and before any more of Earth’s spirits, including ours, are lost forever. If my photographs encourage others to feel the same, that’s all the legacy I could ask for.