PHILOSOPHY

This website and the photography within, is dedicated to the raw, natural beauty of the Earth.  It is my hope that the imagery here will help to promote the idea of conservation and preservation of wild spaces around the globe.

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I have always, to some degree or other, been a nature photographer.  I have discovered though, that "nature" is much more than "moose and birds".  It includes the rocks, the water, the sky, the wetlands, and just about anything else that isn't "man-made" on this planet.  As much of that is inanimate as it is animate.  The Earth is a "closed system" and without all the pieces working together, animate and inanimate, the "whole" falls apart.  The geology and meteorology of Earth is as important as the biology of Earth.  And so it is that my genre is evolving into capturing the essence of the "other", perhaps less conspicuous parts of nature.

It stands to reason that every photographer is a visual person.  As other photographers do, I spend hours and hours observing the work of my peers.  This has a tremendous influence on not only how I shoot, but what I shoot.  All images I look at affect me in some way, but there are a very select few that really grab me in the gut and almost forcibly pull me in a given direction.  In their collective book, "Working the Light" (Joe Cornish, Charlie Waite, David Ward, Eddie Ephraums; Argentum Press, 2007) David Ward wrote of Charlie Waite's photograph of the Sluga Pass, Italy, "The mood of this image is almost overpoweringly ancient."  Indeed, those words describe this magnificent photograph of ancient rock, mountains and sky perfectly.  More than that however, the image itself struck a chord deep inside me, and it took Mr. Ward's description (Mr. Ward is one of the best writers of photography I have met to date) to draw out the true impact this image had on me.  I realized that the images of others I have been drawn to the most are those that depict a more primordial Earth. 

Ian Cameron's work (I best know him from the "Time Catcher's" site) of Scotland is a tremendous inspiration for me and has influenced my evolution to a great degree even before I was able to truly identify where my photography was going (a.k.a. before Charlie Waite's "Sluga Pass").  Mr. Cameron's magnificent images of the Scottish highlands and coastlines depicts "ancient Earth" in ways I have seldom seen in photographs and is every bit a work of nature photography as any image of a Grizzly Bear or Moose.  Even where signs of people have been included in these remote and wild places, the people obviously lived with the land, not detached from it as a great many of us tend to do now.

And so it is, you the viewer will see an ever-increasing emphasis on "the other side of nature" within this site.  There will still be many scenes of the quiet, sunny side of nature, and even some evidence of our modern world (although those will be few and far between), but more and more you will see our past and the more powerful aspects of our Earth.  For certain, people are a part of Earth, although in geologic time we are but a blink of an eye.  I am not a people photographer (I have great admiration for those who are and are good at it however), but I do have an interest in our pioneering past and plan to include a little of that as well.  The First Nations people were true experts at living with nature, and our pioneering families became so (or perished trying), and there is a story to be told there in terms of nature photography.  The essence of this site though will remain "hard core" nature that largely pre-dates humans, and over time you will see an evolution to that end.  The future of the work you will find here will be images from upcoming trips to various seacoasts, the Great Lakes, Scotland, Iceland, Maine, and any other place where the raw power and beauty of Earth is still the predominate feature.  Presently I am fortunate enough to live very close to the Niagara Escarpment, and so right away you will see many aspects of this unique and wonderful piece of natural history, one that has been named by UNESCO as a World Biosphere Reserve.

In the end, the real purpose of this site is to promote conservation and a true appreciation of where we have come from, and indeed where we may be going back to eventually.  I also hope to promote a true appreciation of the raw power of all of nature, and its importance, from wetlands to sea coasts to ice fields to volcanoes.  The Earth is in constant flux, though not always on a time scale we can appreciate.  While we humans would like to think we are in some sort of control, we are really just along for the ride for the most part.  That said, we do have the power to alter our environment enough so as to make the planet uninhabitable for humans (and many other species), so we'd best start taking that into account when we consider our actions.  Preventing global warming or stopping the cutting down the rainforests isn't about saving the Earth.  It's about saving us humans.  The Earth will still be here after we're gone.

Thank you for visiting, thank you for taking the time to read this, and please enjoy your stay.  Please follow the navigation links at the top of each page.