Welcome to one person’s vision of the world around us. This website is a celebration of what nature has accomplished in the time since the formation of our planet, more than four billion years ago. It is also an affirmation of the idea that the most beautiful photographs are those that show our world as it is. But meaningful images must also embody the mind of the photographer. We must try to show in our photos what our minds and our hearts can see, but our cameras can't. How to achieve this? My answer is not to allow technology to take over, while at the same time extracting as much as possible from what technology has to offer. These may sound as contradictory goals, but let me explain.
All of my images are recorded with digital camera bodies. I consider film to be a dead medium, as digital sensors and software can deliver just about anything that film could, and much more too. The camera, however, is no more than a recording device. The image is produced by the lens. The soul of a photograph is in the lens, and in how the photographer is able to understand the personality of the lens. This is where I have parted ways with technology. In the search for some kind of “perfection”, defined by laboratory measurements, most modern “digital” lenses have been rendered sterile and impersonal, little more than surgical instruments. One cannot understand their temperament because they don’t have one. I have thus completely abandoned them and use only vintage manual focus lenses in all of my work. No amount of sensor technology, nor of post-processing wizardry, will ever emulate the glow of a Leica, the sharpness of a Zeiss or the color rendition and bokeh of a Rokkor. Cameras and sensors will come and go, evolve, become obsolete and be replaced. But great lenses, designed perhaps half a century ago and with little more than a slide rule and a drafting table, will live forever.
And what about post-processing, the undoing of many present day image makers? My answer to this question is to record images in raw format and process them only to the extent that is necessary to communicate to the viewer what I saw and felt when I recorded the image. I witness with no small consternation some of the trends that are taking over photography: “stacking” for depth of field, combining images with different exposure settings to generate “HDR” composites, stitching different parts of a scene photographed with different focal lengths, applying canned effects to make an image look like, say, an impressionistic painting. The list goes on - who knows what else somebody will think of next? It does not matter. None of these abominations will ever have a place in my work. Each and every one of my photographs starts out and is carried to completion as a single raw exposure.
I often feel that I am living several decades too late. There is nothing that one can do about that, other than try to capture images of, and write about, a world that no longer exists. I believe that it is often important to place images in the context of why I chose those particular subjects or places, and why I arranged photos in galleries that preserve some unity among them. Short essays explaining this can be found in this link.
Please contact me if you wish to purchase prints of any of the images in this site, or in the sister site, Fourbillionyears.org.
Copyright notice. I am the author of all of the images on this website, and I hold the copyright on all of them. Please do not use them in any medium, electronic or otherwise, without my explicit written authorization.
