My experience of the wild and rural landscapes of the Northeast began 40 years ago in the Ridge and Valley region of NW New Jersey. During the last decade, I have been fortunate to live again in another remarkable ridge and valley landscape – the Berkshire/Taconic landscape.

Forty years ago I was a “competitive hiker” intent on covering miles of trail as fast as possible.  I was moving too fast to observe nature and landscape.  However, these early hikes must have planted some seeds, because over the years I slowed down to a naturalist’s pace, and one thing led to another – birds, flowers, sedges, amphibians, dragonflies, ecology.

Eventually, I became interested in the role of places in helping us to define how we relate to the rest of the world.  The writings of Henry Thoreau, Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver and others have guided explorations of my own special places – an exploration engaging body, mind, and spirit.

My own web site, www.looktotheland.com (under development), takes its name from a Thoreau quote:  “If you would find yourself, look to the land from which you come and to which you go.”

For these past forty years, a camera has been with me in my saunters.  My photography is a careful process, and a good match to my naturalist’s pace and its purpose – to go slow, to watch and listen, and to become attached to places.  I revisit the same places throughout the year, observing a calendar marked by nature’s events. These places remind me of special times spent in them, in solitude and in the company of family and friends.

I switched to digital photography in 2002, documenting my work as a regional ecologist.  In early 2006 I started a new adventure combining my skills as naturalist and nature photographer:  the digital processing of my photos into more “painterly” images (see Technical Specs tab for each print’s page).

My hope is that each of my images suggests a partially-told story.  My part of that story is more than just the memories of the day when I photographed a place.  These kinds of places figure prominently in my personal web of relationships to family, friends, events, ideas: the tangled web which defines my place in the world and gives me strength.  My images convey what these places mean to me, how I feel about them, why I spend time in them (see Extended Information tab for each print).

I hope also that my images will motivate you to develop your own story about your places – to explore them, to sit quietly at the edge of this field or that stream, to find out what is beyond that hill or rock outcrop, or to follow the trail which goes off to somewhere: in other words, to discover something new about these places, which as Thoreau would say, is really something new about yourself.