Val and I visited Virginia and Bud every Saturday for over two years. They had been a delivery on our biweekly meals-on-wheels route, and as happened with many of our people, we continued to visit them once they became too infirmed to live alone. Virginia took a liking to my pictures, and soon her entire wall was filled with 30 or more of the images you see here at Darkness-to-Light.

One fall Saturday about a year after Bud had passed away, Virginia shared with us that with increasing frequency she would wake in the middle of the night, damp and trembling, scared to death. Then she said, “At those moments, I slowly turn to the wall, see your beautiful pictures, and know immediately I am still alive.” That moment reaffirmed for me why I do all this: I do what I do so that you will know you are still alive.

My photography began 40 years ago while I was in the United States Coast Guard. I reached Tokyo, bought my first Nikon, and have been shooting landscapes ever since. I switched wholly to digital in 1999.

Presently, I teach courses in Beginning, Intermediate, & Advanced Digital Photography and in Photoshop for Photographers at a number of the surrounding colleges and universities here in South Carolina. I also lead photography workshops throughout the US West (Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, & Arizona); the Canadian Rockies (Banff, Jasper, Kootenay, & Yoho National Parks); Great Smoky Mountains & Shenandoah National Parks. Click here for full details of all my classes, workshops, and consulting services.

I am frequently published both in ‘Nature Photographer’ and in ‘Camera in the Wild,’ the publication of the Carolina Nature Photographers Association.

Even though this website is relatively new, I have actually been building it for the better part of the past sixty years. These images are my visual definition of life.