After moving to California and being awed by the Sierra Nevada mountain range, he soon developed an interest in hiking, backpacking, and rock climbing.  Photography became the chosen medium for communicating his experiences.  His travels have grown to include the western United States and other parts of the world, and more recently Colorado.

Doug occasionally photographs iconic landmarks, but especially treasures intimate landscapes discovered off the beaten path.  Some images are taken near human development and some far from any trails.  Such photography requires arduous exploration, usually by foot with a heavy backpack, and success is fleeting.

Doug plans some of his photography by checking weather, topographic maps, and sun and moon positions, to maximize his chances for success in the field, but admits that it's always a gamble, especially with a large-format (4x5) camera.

I find fascination and solace in our natural world and I believe that wild, natural places are essential for a healthy human psyche.  Edward Abbey wrote, " We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there...We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis " (Desert Solitaire 129).

Photography is a meditative, solitary quest that satisfies my unexplainable drive (affliction?) to create unique imagery, but the exercise alone has limited meaning unless it is shared with others.  Thus sharing with a broader audience completes "the circle" for me, and I hope my audience finds solace and gains an appreciation and reverence for natural landscapes.

Landscape photography that depicts a pristine environment bathed in exceptional light can be misleading.  Why?  The proliferation of such color photographs implies that these scenes and experiences are commonplace.  They are not.  To create extraordinary photographic imagery requires years of exploration, patience, and visual skill.  He has visited some locations multiple times only to have created the ultimate image during one particular visit when the natural conditions had provided the best possible setting.  Generally speaking, it takes about two weeks in the field to produce an image worthy of sharing with a broader audience.  Also for some pictures, signs of human disruption such as telephone poles, buildings, jet contrails, or roads, have been cropped just outside the camera's field-of-view.  Thus his body of work can unintentionally lead the viewer to a false notion that pristine, beautifully lit, scenes abound.

Color:  He strives for color images to be color-faithful to scene photographed to preserve the beautifully subtle colors found in nature.  There has been a trend since the introduction of Velvia in the 1990's, and more recently in digital photography, toward highly-saturated and highly-warmed images--while this can lead to striking images at first glance, he believes this reduces the image's long-term appeal, veils beautiful natural color hues and important subtle color separation, and undermines the viewer's trust of images captured in exceptional-light circumstances.

On rare occasion, images might be given slight adjustments based upon well understood human color perception.  An example would include post-capture reduction of the blue bias commonly recorded by film in open shade on sunny or overcast days.

This website is best viewed with browsers, such as Mozilla's Firefox, that color-manage photographs in conjunction with a color-calibrated monitor. Some images when viewed with non-color-managed browsers, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer, will exhibit greater color inaccuracies.

To ensure color fidelity and provide state-of-the-art color printing, after years of traditional darkroom work, a post-capture digital workflow has been adopted where corrections are made to the scanned image file before printing.  The original film is displayed on a daylight-balanced light box near a color-calibrated monitor while adjustments are made in Photoshop to match hue, saturation, contrast, and sharpness.  While these corrections produce an image that is faithful to the transparency, the film may not be faithful to the original scene.  A good example is the Johnny Jump Up image.  The yellow flowers exhibited a strong magenta cast on the film, characteristic of Velvia's yellows, so magenta was selectively removed from the yellow colors.

Scene:  Scenes are photographed "as discovered": items are not placed within, or removed from, the picture frame.  A tall tripod and footstool aid in cropping-out undesireable objects during image composition.  Occasionally, obstructions such as out-of-focus branches are temporarily held out of the camera's view during film exposure.  No objects are added or removed digitally from any images.  Doug feels that images produced "as discovered" are inherently more valuable than those that have been manipulated.

Over the years Doug has come to realize he is not a gadget-guy, so he prefers to discuss image aesthetics instead of equipment; however, the first question he is asked by others generally concerns equipment, so here's a little gear-talk.

Format:  A variety of camera formats are deployed, depending on the circumstances, including 4x5 large-format, 35mm, and digital point-and-shoot.  Presently most serious landscape work is approached with a view camera and 35mm format is reserved for telephoto, action, and close-up work.  Many of the images in the Slide Shows, general documentation, and macro work, are captured with a relatively small digital camera.

Film:  For large-format film he generally chooses Provia (RDPIII) sheet film for its ability to render landscapes with medium saturation and reasonably neutral color balance.  It's not a perfect film, but it's suitable for most situations and he likes the results.

For 35mm photography Provia's 100ASA film speed and neutral color make it a favorite for hand-held photography, but its resolution is a limiting factor for print enlargement.  In the past for 35mm landscapes, Kodachrome 25 and Fujichrome Velvia were carried simultaneously in the field for maximum image resolution.  When the light was good, Kodachrome was called to action.  Kodachrome 25 exhibits a slight red bias, but has better saturation than Kodachrome 64.  In less-then-optimal lighting situations Velvia was called upon for it's resolution, contrast, and saturation, despite its inability to render many colors accurately.  He appropriately adjusts each print based on the film it was captured on.  Prints from Velvia film require extra attention by generally reducing color warmth and saturation and adjusting for Velvia's inaccurate color rendition, while taking advantage of Velvia's sharpness.

Lenses:  For the large-format (4x5), 90, 150, and 240mm, lenses are preferred.  Longer lenses are cumbersome and rarely take advantage of the increased resolution offered by large-format, due an all-to-common lack of atmospheric clarity.  His 35mm prime lens selection includes: 21, 24, 28, 35, 50, 70-210, and 300mm lengths.  Single focal length lenses are chosen for maximizing resolution and print enlargements.  The 300mm lens allows creating images where the moon is a large element of a broader landscape, but not so large that it dominates the image.

Tripod:  For view camera work he prefers a Gitzo G1325 carbon fiber tripod and an Arca Swiss ballhead, but prefers the versatile Benbo Trekker when using the smaller formats.

Filters:  He occasionally uses a two-stop soft-graduated neutral density filter.  This "neutral" filter does not alter the image hue.  The "soft-graduation" produces a subtle density variation across the image, unlike hard-graduation filters that sometimes render middle-grounds unnaturally dark.  He chooses not to use other filters, and instead prefers to pursue exceptional natural-light situations.