Living in the mid-coast means that I have easy access to most of southern Maine, including the western mountains. It's a privilege to be in the midst of so many unique natural places that I can reach on short notice. The conditions I often look for when I capture photographs are not rare, but not everyday occurrences, either. I prefer the kind of cloudy-bright weather that brings out the detail in the landscape - small or large. Sunny and dry usually doesn't look interesting to me, I guess. Finding those conditions means watching the weather closely - including detailed forecast maps that predict cloud cover, wind and temperature on a local basis - and being ready to move quickly when they are favorable in a particular area.

All my photographs are captured with a digital SLR camera and nearly all are composites of 2 or more individual shots stitched back together into a single image. Doing that frees me from the landscape/portrait 35mm frame, boosts resolution dramatically and forces me to think about composition every time I 'build' an image in the field. The newest raw image processing features of Photoshop allow me to make most exposure adjustments there, rather than with multiple exposures in the camera. One shot that captures most of the range of light can be used to assemble an image that brings the original reality of the scene home. Working in cloudy conditions reduces that range to something manageable.

I print in color on archival Epson paper and inks. They're made to work together and I'd rather not experiment on that kind of time scale :) It's taken years of trial and error to work out how to get the image from screen to paper. Monitor color correction helps, but in the end it's between you and the ink and the paper. I still find I need to print, hang (without framing) and absorb what an image is before I can adjust it and get to the final version. But it's worth it - to gain back the creative control over the entire process that I once had in B&W film and paper.