I have been a photographer all of my life, starting with a blue, plastic, hand-me-down Kodak Brownie Flash 20 when I was 6 and progressing through 35mm SLRs, 4×5 press and field cameras, and, for the last several years, full-frame digital cameras in addition to 4×5 field cameras. As a child, my family owned a couple of local newspapers in eastern Illinois. My grandfather was the publisher/editor and my Dad was a reporter/photographer. Dad was my first photography teacher and taught me the technical side of film photography, including everything he knew about working in the darkroom, where he was a real master. I have learned most of what I know from teachers, mentors, and photographers of all stripes, both in person and through their published works. And practice. Tens of thousands of hours of practice. Trial and error, excitement and disappointment, laughter and tears, elation and dejection. And critical review. I've been shooting Canon cameras since the mid-1980s, which is also when I decided to focus exclusively on nature, landscape, and wildlife photography. My parents loved nature and passed that love down to me, and I, in my turn, passed it on to my 2 sons. My family would often spend weekends and school holidays at state parks or recreation areas where there were larger blocks of preserved nature, nature centers, and interpretive trails. I soaked it all up like a big, thirsty sponge. Vacations were usually spent “up north” in Minnesota or Canada on a lake. Sometimes we would stay in a nice, cozy log cabin, and sometimes in a tiny fishing shack that was full of mosquitoes and had a family of skunks living under the floor. They were all fantastic adventures and left me wanting to visit real wilderness. For me, photography is an expression of my intimate and life-long connection to the natural world. I’ve always felt that everything – animals (that includes us), plants, rocks, fire, wind, water, places, and Earth herself, have a unique and recognizable spirit and that we are all connected. I love being outside in nature in all seasons and all weather more than being anywhere else. It’s there that I feel most at home and alive. The ephemeral quality of nature and natural light means that no matter how many times you visit a place you’ll never see the same scene twice. My goal as a photographer is to combine my experience and training as both a naturalist and an artist to capture those fleeting images of nature that excite me and strongly express the spirit of my subjects. Because of my long association with and love of film, and the years spent sorting slides and working in darkrooms, my approach to making a photograph is comparable whether the image is captured on film or a digital sensor. I always begin with the end in mind, previsualizing the final print at the moment I’m releasing the shutter. If a scene really excites me, I will stay with that subject until I feel that I have captured the vision of the image from my mind’s eye. Often my vision isn’t of the scene as it is in front of me, and I return again and again in different light, seasons, and weather to find the right mood, searching for the combinations that seem to me to best capture the subject’s spirit and my vision. Sometimes that leads to a series of photographs. Sometimes I never get it just right no matter how hard I try. When I’m making portraits of natural subjects I try to avoid anything that shows the hand of man and strive to avoid causing wildlife to change their behavior because of my presence. But phone lines, power poles, contrails from jets, litter, cell towers, passing cars, and light pollution happen, and wild animals’ job descriptions require them to be smart and wary, so sometimes it’s just not possible to get the shot I wanted. Sometimes that makes a stronger photograph. The final product of photography is the print. It is only in printing a photograph that I feel my artistic vision and intent can be realized and expressed. I love the digital world of photography for the ability to share pictures quickly and broadly, but every screen is different and so I don’t have the same ability to control what I want to emphasize or how the photograph is presented. I am very saddened and concerned that so many of Earth’s beautiful spirits are threatened, endangered, or simply gone forever due to my species’ thoughtless impacts on our planet. We have a lot to answer for. I believe that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness should apply equally to all of nature and that we humans have greatly overstepped our place in the world. My objective is to increase awareness of the natural world and create a connection to my subjects in others through my photographs in the hope that we can come together to 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.