2026.05. 18 – A quiet Saturday morning in Boulder, walking Spruce Street with a small group of photography students, this was my annual Black and White Digital photography class walk.

Once again, dispensing my usual gibberish about light and shadow, depth of field and composition — the kind of nonsense I’ve been talking for the better part of 35 years. This year’s addition was the theme of you don’t have to go far to see beauty.

For the past 25 years I have been living in the most beautiful state in the county and selling camera gear to people who have been traveling to the most exotic countries in the world. During the Covid pandemic, I realized the beauty is place you inhabit not the one you are seeking to find.

So,open your eyes and see what is in front of you.

The day’s photographic canvas was the eclectic Spruce Street neighborhood between Campbell Robertson Park and 9th Street, one of my favorite Boulder neighborhoods to walk and photograph — a quiet contrast to Pearl Street, a block away.

In tow, I had the Nikon Z50 and the MC 50mm macro lens. I wasn’t after the wide view of the neighborhood. I was pressing close, looking for the world inside the world.

Looking at the photograph, Spruce Street & Pine Tree & Needles, I can still feel what I felt looking thru the viewfinder — watching the image shift and breathe as I moved the aperture from a high number down to f/3.3, the bokeh growing more buttery with each stop as the pine needles sharpened into focus.

It was the perfect moment to return a student question from earlier about shooting in B&W mode versus Color mode, and as I showed them the final image, I reviewed Ansel Adams’ idea of pre-visualization and his thoughts on how the lens sees differently than the eye, and the brain.

The image that emerged from that morning, a single branch held sharp against a background that simply surrenders, the right half of the frame dissolving into soft grey pools of bokeh while the needles on the left hold their ground with almost architectural precision, the whole frame quiet and still, carrying the mood of that morning with it.

2026.05.19

This is another image from the same walk — Spruce Street & Shadows & Highlights.

I was thinking about it this morning while walking Judie — somewhere between her sniffing the neighbor’s hedge and pulling toward a squirrel she had no chance of catching, and an unexpected encounter with a leashed stray dog wandering without its human, my mind drifted to an old question. One that photographers, writers, and philosophers have been wrestling with for as long as there have been cameras:

Why do we take pictures?

A lot has been written on the subject. Three books keep coming back to me.

Susan Sontag’s On Photography argues that photographs don’t simply capture reality — they interpret and reshape it. She was one of the first to seriously examine photography as a cultural and political force, and her central worry was that the flood of images was changing us — slowly numbing our emotional responses to the world. Photography, she believed, gives us an imaginary possession of an unreal past. It’s a heavy idea. And not an entirely comfortable one for someone who makes pictures for a living.

Robert Adams comes at it differently — and, for me, more personally. In Why People Photograph, he writes from the inside, from the experience of someone who actually makes pictures. His answer is quiet and considered: photographers are drawn to the medium out of a need to bear witness. To affirm what is beautiful, true, and worth preserving. Adams insists that photography, at its best, is an act of gratitude. I’ve thought about that a lot on the gravel roads of Nine Hills, camera in the handlebar bag, chasing light I may or may not find.

And then there’s Roland Barthes. I just started Camera Lucida, and I’m already underlining things. Barthes wrote it in grief — after his mother died — searching through photographs for some trace of her. He gives us two ideas that feel almost immediately true: the studium, the general cultural meaning we bring to an image, and the punctum — that small, unexpected detail that reaches out of a photograph and stops you cold. For Barthes, photography is unique because it is proof. An irrefutable certificate that something was. That moment existed. That a person stood in a particular light, on a particular morning, and someone was there to see it.

Which brings me back to Spruce Street, and to this image.

A few things jump out immediately. The subject isn’t the stone step — it’s the shadows cast across it. Those thin, branchy lines drawn by morning light across the face of the stone are what hold the frame. The step becomes a canvas, and the real photograph is the one the sun made, not the one I made. I just happened to be there to witness it.

Which feels like exactly the right image to follow that question.

Running it through the three books:

Sontag would say this image is doing what all photographs do — turning a fleeting moment into something permanent. A shadow lasts seconds. This one now lasts forever. That’s the strange power she was writing about.

Adams would call it an act of witness. Nobody else stopped on Spruce Street that morning and saw this. I did. The stone, the light, the shadows — they were asking to be noticed. For Adams, that’s enough. That is the reason.

But it’s Barthes where this image really lands. The studium is straightforward — a stone step, morning light, a quiet Boulder neighborhood. Familiar. Legible. The punctum is those shadows. They don’t look incidental. They look deliberate — calligraphy, almost. A mark left by something alive and reaching toward light, and the light took that reaching and threw it down in sharp lines across cold stone.

That’s the detail that stops you. That’s the one that reaches out of the frame.

Which brings me back to Judie, and the stray dog, and the question that started all of this.

Dog walking and picture-taking have something in common — they both leave room for thought. And somewhere between the shadows on that stone step and the chaos that came later, I kept circling back to the same answer.

Maybe we take pictures because the world keeps leaving us notes — written in light and shadow, on stone steps and pine needles — and we want to write back.

Maybe it’s the process itself. Looking for light. Learning to see the way the camera and lens see, then calibrating that vision against what the eye and brain want. There’s a quiet satisfaction in that negotiation — one that never quite resolves, which is probably why we keep going out.

To take Adams a step further: it’s been years since I’ve watched an image breathe and come to life in a tray of developer, in a darkroom, but the pleasure of pre-visualization is still there. Seeing the finished photograph before I make it — how it will feel on the screen, on the wall — that’s part of the process too. Maybe the most important part.

Or maybe it’s simpler than all of that. I can’t play guitar. I can’t play tennis. This is the thing I do. The thing I have been doing for four and a half decades — and still enjoy, still learn from, and am fortunate enough to do. And to teach to others who enjoy it too.

Which brings me back to this morning’s walk — the one that didn’t go exactly as planned.

Near the community garden, a stray dog appeared — leash dragging, no human attached — teeth bared, furious. Coming straight at us.

I did what you do. I picked Judie up like a twenty-pound football, tucked her against my chest, and started walking backwards. Slowly. Quietly.

A neighbor with two dogs of her own, in the distance yelled go away, and the German Shepherd mix stepped back. Then forward. Then back again.

By the time I reached the intersection where three roads converge, I was done being quiet. Back off. Back off. Back off. The deep, husky voice I’ve apparently had since I first opened my mouth some fifty-odd years ago in New Jersey — that one. I kept repeating it until he listened.

The dog and I were locked in a slow, meditative standoff — him stepping forward, me stepping backward, Judie perfectly still in my arms — both of us waiting to see who’d blink first, when a man in the passenger seat of a white SUV pulled in front of me and started yelling at me to leave him alone.

He explained that he too was handicapped. That I needed to back off.

He had no idea I was talking to the dog. He must have assumed I was yelling at the man who couldn’t hold the leash — the other handicapped man.

And that’s when whatever was left of my morning composure quietly excused itself. I told the man in the car — in very clear, very specific terms — exactly what I thought of his input. It gets a little blurry after that. But the sentiment was unambiguous.

It’s the way we talk back home in New Jersey when we’re angry, afraid, passionate. No passive aggression. No subtext. Just sound — direct and unambiguous. Not unlike the noise that dog made when he came at Judie and me.

Walking back to the condo, somewhere between the community garden and our front door, I had a moment to reflect.

This morning could have turned out differently. I was lucky it turned out the way it did.

A few thoughts stay with me and will for some time.

Mind your own business until you know all the facts — all of them.

If you can’t hold the leash, you must give up the privilege of the dog.

You can take the kid out of Jersey, but you can’t take the Jersey out of the kid, I smiled.

And then, once again, my mind turned back to the question.

Maybe we take pictures because the world keeps leaving us notes — written in light and shadow, on stone steps and pine needles. On a good morning, we have that grace.

Other mornings, we are navigating life’s challenges and quietly thinking about the world we are living through and wondering about how we could do things differently when confronted with adversity.

2026.05.20

– Same walk. Same morning. Same reason I stopped.

Not the fence. The paint.

There’s something about peeling paint that I can’t walk past — the way it lifts and curls and cracks, leaving these irregular maps of what the surface used to look like. It’s texture you can almost feel without touching it. And in black and white, with the Z50 and the 50mm, that texture becomes the whole story.

The white picket fence is one of those images we think we already know. We’ve seen it a thousand times — it means something before you even raise the camera. Hometown. Stability. The tidy American dream. But get close enough, and it starts telling a different story. These pickets are weathered. The paint is going. And I think that’s more interesting than a freshly painted fence ever could be.

The depth of field was intentional. I wanted those three pickets sharp — peeling and present — and everything behind them to fall away. The second fence, the porch, the window — they become atmosphere. Context without distraction. The eye goes where the texture is.

It’s the same instinct that stopped me at the stone step and the shadows. I’m not looking for the postcard. I’m looking for the thing inside the postcard that nobody bothered to photograph. The wear. The light. The detail that’s been there all along, waiting for someone to get close enough to notice it.

That’s the punctum, if we’re still running Barthes. The peeling paint. That’s what reaches out of the frame.

Not the fence. The paint.

2026.05.23

Yesterday morning continued the way the best ones do — quietly, without agenda.

Judie and I made our way out to the Lake Arbor Golf Course fairways on what turned out to be the first genuinely clear spring morning of the season. I had my NIKKOR Z MC 50mm f/2.8 with me, that trusted little macro, the one that gets down to just over half a foot from the focal plane.

For days I had been moving through the landscape looking for something worth stopping for, thinking about abstraction, thinking about black and white, thinking about how close I could get to the bristles that crown each piece of fruit along the path.

There is something that an hour like that does that nothing else can quite replicate. I felt the world go quiet in the way it rarely does anymore — aging parents, the war grinding on in Ukraine, the tremors building in Iran, and whatever is gathering on the horizon in Cuba all fell away for a little while. I often think about my niece and nephew and their peers, about the oligarchs tightening their grip on a country that owes those kids something better, about a pendulum that has swung so far in one direction it has nearly forgotten the other side exists. For sixty minutes, none of it was mine to carry.

I came home and planted a batch of organic seedlings in our community garden plots before the cold I have been fighting since last Saturday finally won the afternoon. I slept it off, or tried to — and then I woke up, because that word still means what it has always meant regardless of what the politics of the day has done to it.

After waking up, I was no, more certain of what I am dealing with.

This morning I am slower than I would like, a little fogged, the headaches leaving me to wonder whether this is a common cold, the flu, or Covid — a test later today will settle it.

I keep coming back to those bristles and that macro lens and what I might have found if I had gotten just a few inches closer, because some mornings leave you with more questions than photographs, and those tend to be the ones worth writing about.

Dandelion #1 –

Yesterday I really focused on the lens and the dandelion.

The exhausted seed head at the center of the frame reads less like a weed and more like a crown — gnarled, textured, almost medieval — while the remaining seeds dissolve into soft light at the edges, caught somewhere between structure and disappearance. The black and white conversion strips away any botanical literalness and lets the tonal contrast do the heavy lifting, the blown whites of the wispy filaments pulling hard against the dark, dense core.

It is the kind of image where the closer you look, the less certain you are of what you are looking at, which is exactly what I was hoping the macro would do.

Dandelion # 2 –

The bristles are telling a different story than the ones in #1, and it took me a moment to understand what that story was. In #1 the bristles are survivors — clinging, dense, radiating outward from that dark core like they are holding something together against its will.

In #2 they have surrendered to the light, each filament tracing its own long, clean line across the frame, the individual strands visible from base to tip in a way that feels almost architectural, like a blueprint for something that is about to cease to exist. There is a stillness to them that #1 never allows — no drama, no tension between dark and light, just the quiet geometry of dispersal, each bristle doing the only thing it was ever meant to do.

If #1 is the dandelion holding on, #2 is the dandelion letting go.

Dandelion #3 –

If #1 is the dandelion holding on and #2 is the dandelion letting go, then #3 is the dandelion already gone — or nearly so. The frame is almost entirely soft, the background a pale mid-tone wash of out-of-focus filaments layered over one another like ghost impressions, the whole image existing somewhere between a photograph and a memory.

What saves it from pure abstraction is the single seed cluster in the lower left corner, sharp and fully resolved, its individual bristles fanning outward with a precision that makes everything else in the frame feel like it is receding from that one fixed point. That sharp cluster is doing all the heavy lifting — without it the image floats away entirely, but with it you have an anchor, a last clear thing before the dissolution takes over. It is the most minimal of the three, the quietest, and in some ways the most honest about what a dandelion actually is — not a weed, not a crown, but a delivery system for disappearance, doing its work one bristle at a time.

7.16.13 – Old Memories –

These images Ward, Colorado. July 13, 2013.

These images were taken about 13 years ago and still on a memory card last week that I found while getting ready to sell two Nikon D200’s that I have not used in over a decade.

Looking over image, Dandelion #1, I first realize it was misnamed (late night editing) – it should be called Wildflower #1.

This wildflower was bowing under its own weight when I found it at Brainard Lake. There’s an elegance to that — the way it leans against that dark, softly textured background. I was shooting with a 60mm micro and what it gave me were details I honestly wasn’t expecting: the cracked skin at the base of the stem, the fine hairs catching light, the petals falling open like draped fabric. Something entirely ordinary becoming almost architectural.

I knew right away this one wanted to be black and white. Color would have turned it into a botanical record. Black and white made it a study in form and gravity. Those near-blown highlights at the flower head — that brightness — reads to me like a last gasp before the thing goes fully to seed.

If you know Barthes, you know studium and punctum. The studium here is straightforward enough — a wildflower, late in its cycle, macro work in the mountains. But my punctum, the thing that stops me every time I look at this print, is that cracked, almost reptilian texture at the base of the stem. It doesn’t belong to the same world as those soft petals above it. That tension is what keeps my eye moving. That’s what made me stop and get low in the first place.

05.28.26 – Deconstructed Bicycle –

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