Digital capture is flexible and simple, and right now I prefer it. Someday I may also find the patience to shoot on film and see where that takes me. For a long time in the beginning, I was excited about conceptual photography, and full of ideas so complex in their execution that most of them never made it out of my head. A while later, I let that all go, with relief, and followed the path of least resistance.

I’ve always found solitary walks in the woods to be good medicine, and started bringing a camera with me about 15 years ago. I grew fascinated by tiny convergences of light, perspective, texture, and shape. I came to feel I was at home in a strange place we never see even though it’s everywhere we look. Here there were wordless dialogues with plants, mushrooms, faces in rock and dead wood. Here there were landscapes of cedar bark furrowing through afternoon light and shadow, lichen like sagebrush across the curved plain of a branch, weird geometry in cat-ice over a winter brook.

We love to forget ourselves in the midst of a joyous activity. Remember the frustration of being pried away from your twilight games at suppertime as a kid? There’s nothing better than those twilight games. Here’s mine: with a camera, I go out and find the vast poetry nested inside the ordinary world, and that in a small way I’m written into it.