Whether in the classical darkroom or the digital darkroom, I think alterations to the image should only be made when it’s necessary to achieve your visualization about the photograph.  I have particular concern for photographers that approach image making with the cavalier attitude of ,”it really doesn’t matter… I can fix it in Photoshop!”

I have never had a great deal of interest in the grand landscape.  I am more strongly attracted to quieter, more intimate details of the natural environment.  I can only hope that the quite solitude that interests me is visible in some of my  images.

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. ~ Colen Powell

“I am not interested in shooting new things – I am interested to see things new.”

~Ernst Haas

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When I start out for a day, I usually have something in mind, but I don’t fixate on it.  Finding subject matter is the process of narrowing down the possibilities.  I’m always open to whatever nature provides me.  I can be driving in the middle of nowhere and see something that attracts my eye, something that makes it special, and I have to listen – even if it’s not on my list.

…, it is our contention that the self is more emphatically emphasized by ignoring it and concentrating on the [subject] itself.  Personal knowledge is gained by objectification, looking outward not inward. Life itself is the mirror in which the personal image is reflected.

No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.

Like Thoreau, who had gone to the woods because he “wished to live deliberately, to front only essential facts of life” and to “transact some private business with the fewest obstacles,” I embraced this endeavor, with some trepidation, to see if I could find what had drawn me so long ago to my art, and to see if I had become as perceptive of nature as I hoped.  “To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself,” wrote Thoreau.

Nature cannot be twisted to our whims, not even for the purpose of capturing her beauty on film.  She must be approached on a level at once aware of both her charms and her harshness.  Hers is not a world solely of “calendar” scenes,,, but one also of mystery and hardness, built of the timeless recycling of energy as creatures and plants die and are reborn.  Thoreau’s “sunrise” is the calendar photograph that comprises what for some is their sole understanding of nature.  My hope was that I would be able to cajole from her something deeper.

{Written as the introduction to Jim’s wonderful book “Chased by the Light” in which he undertakes to expose one frame of file a day for 90 consecutive days from the autumnal equinox to the winter solstice in the north woods of Minnesota.  To see the photograph referenced by ‘Thoreau’s “Sunrise”‘ go to Day 10 – Boundary Waters Loons.}

…all photographers of stature whom I admire seem to share this fundamental characteristic:  a deep and long-lasting respect and love for the subject matter.

… photography is only a tool, a vehicle, for expressing or transmitting a passion in something else.