I was born in Alice, Texas in the heart of the South Texas Brush Country and grew up in San Antonio. My family had land near Hondo (about 40 miles southwest) where my brothers and I loved to fish, hunt, and chase armadillos through the blackbrush and mesquite. I really didn't get interested in photography until I took my first trip to Big Bend National Park after graduating from high school in 1968. I borrowed an old Kodak Signet 35 from my boss, and after shooting six rolls of slide film I knew I was hooked.
In 1973, after three years studying architecture and two in a dead-end job in an insurance company, I enrolled in Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California where I studied Industrial Photography and Color Technology. That qualified me to photograph bullets flying through the air, exploded views of power tools and occasional portraits of corporate executives. After graduating in 1976 with a thorough training in the technical aspects of photography, I began photographing landscapes with a 4"x5" view camera, which is what I wanted to do in the first place. To actually earn money, I got a job managing the photo lab, teaching darkroom and studio techniques, and checking out equipment to students in the Photojournalism program at the University of Texas in Austin from 1976 - 1980.
In my occasional trips to Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas during those years, I shot mainly black and white film with my 4x5 view camera. In 1979, I saw a book by pioneering color landscape photographer Eliot Porter entitled Intimate Landscapes. The photographs in Porter's book were a revelation. Carefully visualized and precisely composed, the images revealed a very personal and somewhat unconventional vision of the natural world in lush, saturated colors. From that time on, I photographed exclusively on 4" x 5" color transparency film.
In 1980, my wife, Nancy and my son, Ben and I moved to North Carolina, where Nancy had landed a job at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I used the opportunity to photograph a completely different kind of landscape than I had experienced back west. At the time, it was still almost unheard of to make a living shooting landscapes, so I supplemented our income by doing carpentry.
In 1983, I got a chance to move back to Texas and serve as Chief Photographer for the Texas Tourist Development Agency (later, the Texas Dept. of Commerce, Tourism Division). Finally, I had found a job where I could get paid to shoot landscapes (as well as portraits, architecture, festivals, and grip-and-grin shots). I had that dream job until 1990, when politics ruined it, and I left to start a stock photography business specializing in Texas landscapes. I sold my work for books, calendars, magazines, and exhibition prints.
I was a little slow in accepting the digital revolution in photography which really began to pick up steam about the same time I started my business. By the late-1990s, after seeing the enormous strides made in silicon technology and the resultant tidal wave of archival inks and papers that followed, I finally bought a film scanner and my first version of Photoshop. For the first time, I felt like I could make a color print that matched what I saw when I took the picture. Archival inks and papers make it possible not only to create a print with comparable or better color than of any other process, but also one which will last longer than those any conventional technology can produce. The traditional darkroom with its foul chemical smells and tedious procedures has been replaced by computers with ingenious software and incredible color printers that allow the photographer to tweak the image by adjusting color balance, brightness, contrast, saturation and even sharpness.
I photograph landscapes first and foremost because I love to be in the places I capture on film (or digital sensor). I'm not very good at photographing people because it's too hard for me to consistently elicit the proper responses that result in likenesses that they approve of. For me it is a challenge to find the best view, choose the right lens, wait for the best light, and get the landscape image that I envisioned.
My landscape photographs are not about presenting an exact record of what was in front of my camera at the time I made the exposure. They are recreations of my impressions of what I see. There is no such thing as a photograph that is a perfect visual record of anything. There are many variables that go into it. You can shoot a scene on ten different color film stocks and you will get ten different renditions. Saying that any one of them is truest to what you saw is a strictly subjective thing. So, when you look at my images, know that they are my interpretations of what I saw.