All of the prints in my portfolio were made from black and white infrared negatives. Infrared film makes it possible to obtain photographs of energy invisible to the human eye. The film is sensitive to energy in the near infrared range and some red, green, blue and violet light. Photographs made from infrared negatives have an ethereal look and convey a mysterious and magical quality. Because of its unusual effects and distortion of reality, I have found that I can use infrared film for artistic expression. But the film was not developed with art or distortion in mind—its original purpose was to enhance reality for scientific purposes.

I seek spontaneity in my photographs. I am always looking for natural events whose timing and location cannot be predicted. I seek to portray the beauty of the land and our relationship to it. It is from an understanding and appreciation of this relationship that an ethos of stewardship for the earth and its myriad inhabitants springs.

In my photography I want to draw the viewer into a seemingly timeless, three-dimensional world. Within each photograph is an environment in which the viewer can find peace, solitude and harmony. It is an environment that you can crawl into many times without ever tiring of the trip; you return time and time again.

I am an ecologist who is also a photographer. I believe a well-composed photograph is a form of visual poetry. Like poetry, it provides order and structure to an otherwise complex and confusing natural world. Like poetry, it captures the magic and mystery of human experience, and like poetry, it achieves this integration with the fewest visual elements necessary to viewer understanding.

My seven years of university training is in natural resources management. Most of my work experience has been in national park and wilderness management and research in the West. I have explored and photographed natural parks and wilderness areas of the Pacific Northwest, California’s Sierra Nevada, Southwest, central and northern Rocky Mountains, Alaska and the Upper Midwest.

I am self-taught as a photographer. I have been developing and refining my photographic abilities since 1968, when I first learned to develop and print black and white negatives. In 1970, while contact printing electric circuit diagrams onto Kodalith film, I became curious about the type of image that I could create by exposing a black and white negative onto this film. My experiment produced several interesting prints. Since that time, much of my efforts in photography have been devoted to obtaining aesthetic images on Kodalith film. Prior to 1975, I experimented with a number of panchromatic film exposure and development techniques that produced negatives that resulted in more detailed prints.

In 1975, I found that infrared film exposed on overcast days produced a very flat negative. Infrared negatives are also very grainy. When printed on Kodalith film, however, the contract of the infrared image is greatly increased and the grain becomes very crisp and distinct. In 1980, I learned that Kodalith film reacted very differently in Kodalith Fine Line film developer than it does in Kodalith film developer. What I had been trying for years to achieve with Kodalith film was suddenly realized. The first print that I created using Kodalith Fine Line film developer was Maroon Bells. Since then, I have been using Fine Line developer to print infrared negatives on Kodalith film with very satisfying aesthetic results.

I expose my infrared negatives directly onto 8 x 10 inch Kodalith film. This produces a positive black and white image (which I call a Kodalith positive). I send the Kodalith positive to a graphics art laboratory for enlargement. From an 8 x 10-inch positive, the lab makes a 16 x 20-inch continuous tone internegative and numerous contact prints on Ilford Galerie paper.