My philosophy

Though I got my start with digital photography and have no experience with film, I do consider myself a purist in the sense that I try to do as little editing as possible; I think the real work comes in the preparation: putting yourself in the right place at the right time, in the right lighting conditions, and knowing exactly how to operate the camera when a scene or moment presents itself. Case in point, the image on my homepage of lightning bugs, shot on a moonless night in west Texas. This was an image I had conceived of over 9 years before I actually found myself in the right conditions to capture it!

I shoot everything in "raw" format, which is essentially a digital negative. This means the color, sharpness, contrast, lights, shadows, etc. are all very neutral out of the camera, and need to be edited to the best of my ability with one goal in mind: faithfully and accurately representing the scene exactly as I saw it, and in doing so, capturing that feeling and emotion inherent to the moment. I strive to not produce an image that looks different or somehow more dramatic than the scene itself was (though admittedly I got a little carried away with vignetting when I first got into photography!). This means things like stacking photos for a higher dynamic or focal range, or combining multiple images to produce things the human eye cannot otherwise see, are techniques I usually shy away from. Basically, I'm a one-shot-per-image type of photographer. And it goes without saying that I am adamantly opposed to using any Ai tools to generate content that wasn't in the original scene. That may be digital art, but it's not photography.