Most people stand in front of a waterfall and photograph the waterfall. I'm the one off to the side, crouched over a small cascade everyone else walks past. That is the work: nature looked at closely and broken down into the smaller pieces that quietly make a scene hold together. Intimate nature and landscape, most of it shot in the Blue Ridge of Virginia.
A view that stops you is rarely doing it with one big gesture. It is a stack of small things your eye takes in without ever naming them, and my job is to find those pieces and photograph them on their own terms. A camera is honest in a way the mind is not. Point it at something and it records what is actually there, not the tidied-up version memory hands you. Often what the camera saw and what I thought I saw turn out to be two different pictures, and the second one is usually better. I work in two registers, wide or tight, almost never the middle. I either open a scene right up or press in close enough to pull one small thing out of it.
Before any of this I spent a long career as an engineer, and the habit never left: take the thing apart, work out why it does what it does, then put it back together. These days I point that at a landscape instead of a problem. I am South African by origin and came to these mountains as an adult, still learning to read them. After years away from any serious shooting, a new camera and what it did with colour pulled me back in, and a desert workshop that ran from dusk into full dark is where it properly took hold.
Half the picture happens later, at the desk, where I routinely find things I missed in the field, often enough to send me back to shoot a scene a second time. Prints are available, and I write at length about the how and the why of all of it on the blog