The Photographer

Above: Dunes of the Western Sahara

I grew up in New Jersey, midway between Philadelphia and Long Beach Island. My father and uncle taught me photography, and we developed our own prints in a basement darkroom. I learned to dodge and burn in a darkroom decades before digital photography.

After graduating Rutgers University, I served in the US Army in Alaska and Japan. These experiences instilled a desire to travel and learn, and rekindled my photography interests.

I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, with my wife of 34 years, but have a great yearning for remote places.

Right: Plateau Point, 3000 feet below the Grand Canyon Rim, on the way to the Colorado River, 2021



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My Brittany Spaniel. She is my hiking companion and home office manager. Don't let her pedigree fool you: she is a wild woman.

My Favorite Quotations


Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
- Mark Twain

To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, to gain all while you give, to roam the lands of the remote: to travel is to live. - Hans Christian Andersen

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, and avalanches; but he cannot save them from fools—only Uncle Sam can do that. - John Muir

If all beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man. All things are connected. - Chief Seattle

The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. - Theodore Roosevelt at the Grand Canyon

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. - Bertrand Russell

Let us cherish all creatures, as a mother does her only child. - Buddha

Grandfather, our Sacred One, teach us love, compassion, and honor that we may heal the earth and heal each other. - Ojibwa Prayer

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself. - D.H. Lawrence

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. - Martin Luther King

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that a democracy means that 'my' ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. - Isaac Asimov

If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power. - Dwight Eisenhower