Much of the way I photograph is shaped not by other photographers, but by painters. My three primary influences span over 150 years of art history. Jackson Pollock, J. M. W. Turner, and Wassily Kandinsky’s work is radically different, yet each taught me something about pattern, light, and space. The common thread is that their work is less about describing a subject and more about creating an experience.

Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings initially appear chaotic: paint flung, poured, and splattered across enormous canvases. But researchers studying Pollock’s work have found mathematical fractal structures repeating within many of those paintings. We find similar forms in branching trees, river systems, and coastlines.

That idea has had an enormous influence on my photography. I am constantly looking for places where nature seems to organize apparent chaos into something coherent. From the air, a braided river can resemble a Pollock canvas. Up close, cracks in stone or the markings on an insect can contain the same sense of repetition across scale. Pollock reminds me that an image does not need a single subject or focal point. Sometimes the pattern itself is the subject.

Turner stretched me in a different direction. His images taught me to look at light as a subject. In many of his paintings, objects seem to dissolve. Ships and coastlines become secondary to atmosphere. Light scatters and the painting becomes as much about perception as place.

I think about Turner whenever I photograph water. I rarely care about the actual ocean or river. Instead, I study what light is doing the water’s surface. A tiny change in the angle of the sun can transform water from something transparent into silver, gold, darkness, or pure abstraction. Turner understood that light is not simply what allows us to see the subject. Light can be the subject.

I find Kandinsky’s influence more compositional. His later paintings increasingly became worlds of circles, lines, geometric shapes, colors, and forms suspended in space. I love the tension between those elements: how one shape pushes against another, how empty space becomes active, and how visual relationships create rhythm.

That is often what I am searching for when I photograph from a helicopter or through a microscope. Once scale and context disappear, a river, mineral, butterfly wing, or fragment of ice stops being primarily an object. It becomes line, mass, texture, repetition, and negative space.

Pollock taught me to see pattern within chaos. Turner taught me to see light as substance. Kandinsky taught me to pay attention to the space between things.

Together, they helped teach me something fundamental about photography: sometimes the most interesting question is not What am I looking at? It is What is happening inside this frame?

Recent News

• PATTERNS was awarded Best Nature Photo Book of the Year by the International Photography Awards

• My Elements of Wonder show will be at the Festival of Ethical Photography in Italy from 26 September to 25 October

Photo of the Week

22 years ago my wife Caren and I opened our first school in western Kenya and founded The Kilgoris Project. Today we have 6 campuses and provide education, healthcare, and clean water to 2500 Massai kids. This has been an extraordinary journey for us and I’m proud to share it here.

If you’d like to help out we are doing our annual Back To School campaign.

About My Book

I probably don’t see color the way you do. All of us perceive color a little differently, but around 5% of people experience it very differently. It’s not that I don’t see color; there are simply some colors that look the same to me, so I can’t easily differentiate between them. Every spring, for example, social media fills with photographs of red flowers set against green leaves. These photographs don’t make sense to me because the reds and greens can look almost identical. I don’t see the color contrast that 95% of the world finds so striking.

Because color differentiation is not always available to me, texture and pattern have become my first language of seeing. I see lines, spirals, waves, and webs. Over time, I’ve stopped seeing this as a disadvantage. Instead, it allows me to look past the obvious beauty of color and revel in subtler details.

This pushes my compositions toward abstraction. I’ve become less interested in representing what a photograph is of and more interested in sharing what I actually see. This way of seeing works across many different scales, from macro photographs of tiny insects all the way to aerial landscapes. Regardless of physical size, the image is reduced to form, geometry, texture, and spatial relationships.

The more photographs I take, the more I notice the same patterns repeating across the natural world. A cracked riverbed in Death Valley is echoed in the pattern of a giraffe’s coat, then appears again in slabs of Utah septarian rock formed deep within the Earth more than 100 million years ago, and also occurs in a salt pan.

Patterns can create surprises, too. A few years ago, I photographed the delicate lines on the forehead of a Grévy’s zebra in northern Kenya (below left). Months later, while looking through a microscope, I saw a remarkably similar pattern reflected back at me, this time in a highly magnified view of caffeine smeared across a microscope slide (below right).

Don’t take any of this to mean that I think color is unimportant. I’m actually quite jealous of people who have full color perception. But I’ve come to understand that color is only one component of the wonder on display before us.

Despite my envy of the “colorful 95%,” I’m thankful for the gift of the dysfunctional cone cells in my eyes. They have forced me to engage more deeply with the world in general, and with the natural world in particular. Sometimes gifts come from the oddest places.

Recent News

My Elements of Wonder show is still up at the Maven Gallery

Photo of the Week

As the sun dips in the evening, there are about 20 minutes when the Eureka Dunes in Death Valley glow with a faint red. The actual color becomes less important than the reduced tonal range. With color subdued, you can focus more intently on the brush-like strokes that shape the dunes.

About My Book

There is a version of environmental storytelling that believes people must be frightened into caring.

Show folks a burning forest. Show them the starving animal. Show them the flood, the drought, the bleaching reef, the collapsing ice. Make the danger impossible to ignore.

And sometimes that is necessary. We should not look away from what is happening to the Earth. The losses are real. The damage is accelerating. The grief belongs in the story.

But doom has limits.

Despair can shock us awake, but it rarely keeps us moving. It narrows the world. It makes the future feel already decided. And when people begin to believe that nothing they do matters, they stop asking what they can protect.

This is the danger of doom as a strategy. It can turn urgency into paralysis.

I think beauty works differently.

Beauty does not deny the crisis. It gives us a reason to remain in relationship with the world despite the crisis. It reminds us that the Earth is not an abstract system failing somewhere far away. It is a living pattern of rivers, wings, minerals, forests, ice, insects, oceans, and light. It is still astonishing. Still intimate. Still here.

My work begins from that place.

I photograph the natural world not because it is untouched, but because it is worth noticing. Patterns in beetle wings, glacial ice, braided rivers, sand, stone, and microscopic life reveal a planet of extraordinary intelligence and coherence. They ask us to look longer. And looking longer changes the nature of concern.

You cannot protect what you have already given up on.

Environmental action needs truth, but it also needs attachment. It needs wonder. It needs the feeling that the world is not only wounded, but beloved.

Doom may tell us what we stand to lose.

Beauty helps us remember why it matters.

Recent News

• My book Patterns was written up in Czech Nat Geo this week!

• I did an interview with Pamela Chen for Strudelmedia. Watch it here.

Photo of the Week

Four hundred million years ago, this ammonite moved through an ancient sea, carrying its home in a chambered spiral that grew with it, one perfect curve at a time. Now stone has replaced shell, mineral crystals fill the spaces where soft tissue and seawater once existed, and the geometry of a vanished life remains astonishingly intact. I am drawn to the way deep time has transformed the fossil without erasing its original design. It is part animal, part architecture, and part geological painting, a reminder that some of nature’s most beautiful patterns were being made long before there were eyes to see them.

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Awe often begins with a failure of scale.

We stand beneath a redwood, look into a field of stars, or watch a storm move across the ocean, and suddenly our ordinary measurements no longer seem adequate. The world becomes larger than our ability to explain it. For a moment, the mind has to stretch.

One of the most remarkable effects of awe is that it makes the self feel smaller. Not diminished or unimportant, but placed back into proportion. Psychologists sometimes describe this as the “small self”: a temporary loosening of our usual preoccupation with our own worries, ambitions, and internal commentary.

This shrinking can feel like relief.

Most of the time, our attention is tightly organized around the self. What do I need? What might go wrong? How am I being perceived? What must I do next? The brain is constantly sorting the world according to its relevance to us.

Awe interrupts that process. It redirects attention outward.

When we encounter something vast, beautiful, or difficult to comprehend, the mind becomes less occupied with maintaining its existing story. Our perception widens. We become more receptive to information, more aware of relationships, and more willing to revise what we think we know.

This is part of what I have experienced while making Patterns.

The work began by looking repeatedly at a small stretch of beach. At first, I saw sand, water, stones, foam. But sustained attention changed the landscape. The beach became a network of lines, repetitions, fractures, spirals, and branching forms. The longer I looked, the less the objects seemed isolated. Everything appeared connected to something else.

A river seen from the air began to resemble the veins of a leaf. A mineral contained the suggestion of an entire landscape. The structure of a diatom echoed forms found at vastly larger scales.

The brain is especially responsive to this kind of patterned complexity. Natural forms frequently combine repetition with variation: enough order to feel coherent, but enough surprise to keep attention engaged. Branching trees, river systems, clouds, coastlines, feathers, and crystalline structures are not perfectly regular. They repeat without becoming predictable.

Looking at them gives the mind something rare: complexity without chaos.

This may be one reason sustained attention to nature can feel both stimulating and restorative. We are alert, but not necessarily threatened. Our eyes move through layers of structure. The brain searches for relationships, makes predictions, discovers exceptions, and continually adjusts its understanding.

Awe arrives when those relationships exceed the limits of our first glance.

The photograph then becomes more than a record of an object. It becomes an invitation to enter a different scale of attention—to move beyond naming and begin noticing.

Awe does not erase the self. It releases us from the burden of placing the self at the center of everything.

We return from that experience still ourselves, but differently proportioned: a little quieter, a little more curious, and perhaps more conscious that we belong to a world far larger, stranger, and more interconnected than we usually allow ourselves to see.

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I’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment, restack this article in the Substack app, or shoot me an email. Let me know what you want to hear more about: conservation, patterns, neurosciense, photograph, … just let me know.

Recent News

My Elements of Wonder show is hanging at Maven Gallery until the end of September.

Photo of the Week

Fresh from fishing for salmon, a grizzly bear shakes the river from its coat. Backlit by the low sun, each strand of hair catches the light, tracing a luminous outline around the bear’s immense form. The spray breaks into thousands of suspended droplets, an expanding constellation of water that turns a simple movement into pattern. For a fraction of a second, the bear seems held between solidity and dissolution, its dark body edged in gold while the river scatters into stars around it.

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Antarctica is one of the few places on Earth where the human sense of scale stops working.

A wall of ice that seems close enough to touch may be miles away. A dark mark at the base of a glacier might be a seal, a boulder, or the entrance to a cave large enough to swallow a building. With no trees, roads, or houses to measure against, the eye loses its usual anchors.

Time becomes equally difficult to grasp.

The ice beneath your feet may have fallen as snow before cities existed. Glaciers move too slowly for us to see, yet they are always advancing, fracturing, grinding, and melting. Antarctica appears still, but nearly everything within it is in motion.

That is part of its power. It teaches scale by removing the things we normally use to understand it.

From a distance, an iceberg can appear almost weightless. It floats with the delicacy of a cloud, catching the low light in blue, silver, and white. Wind and water carve arches, fluted walls, terraces, and overhanging ledges. What began as snowfall becomes architecture.

Ice in Antarctica is not simply frozen water. It is landscape, sculpture, archive, and warning, often all at once.

It is landscape because much of what appears to be land is ice. Glaciers pour between mountains and spread toward the sea. Pressure ridges, crevasses, wind-carved textures, and melt channels cross surfaces that first appear empty. The longer I look, the less blank the continent becomes.

It is sculpture because gravity, wind, saltwater, pressure, and temperature are always shaping it. Some icebergs are sharp and geometric. Others are rounded and organic, hollowed into caves or balanced on narrow foundations below the waterline. Their surfaces recall marble, glass, porcelain, and translucent stone.

They seem designed, but no hand made them.

Nature has always worked with the visual principles we later named as art: balance, repetition, rhythm, contrast, texture, and form. An iceberg is one of its most extraordinary sculptures, made more beautiful by the knowledge that it is temporary.

Every arch will collapse. Every polished edge is already changing. Its disappearance is part of its making.

Ice is also an archive.

Each year, falling snow is buried and compressed. Bubbles of ancient atmosphere become trapped inside. Dust, salt, ash, and chemical traces settle into layers. Over thousands of years, the ice becomes a record of climates no human being witnessed.

The continent remembers what the rest of the world has forgotten.

A blue wall of ice is not only shape and light. It is accumulated time. Its surface exists in the present, while its interior holds deep history.

Photography is also a form of memory, though a much smaller one. A photograph says that this place existed, in this form, under this light. In Antarctica, that act carries unusual weight. An image made as a study of beauty may one day become a record of absence.

The ice is astonishing, and it is vulnerable.

Its scale can make it appear indestructible. A glacier many miles wide does not look fragile. Yet size is not the same as permanence. Changes measured in fractions of degrees can weaken shelves, accelerate glaciers, and eventually redraw coastlines far beyond the continent itself.

Antarctica is remote, but it is not separate.

Standing before an iceberg, I feel physically insignificant. Yet our collective influence is anything but small. We are tiny creatures capable of altering systems larger than anything we can easily imagine.

Perhaps that is Antarctica’s deepest lesson.

It asks us to hold two scales in mind at once: the planetary and the personal, the ancient and the immediate, the monumental and the vanishing.

The wide view helps us understand the system. The close view gives us a reason to care.

We can begin with a line in the ice and arrive at the history of the atmosphere. We can begin with the curve of an iceberg and arrive at the future of coastal cities. We can begin with beauty and arrive at responsibility.

Antarctica does not make us feel small merely to diminish us.

It makes us small enough to see more clearly.

Recent News

My Elements of Wonder show is hanging at Maven Gallery until the end of September.

I’m thrilled that my book, Patterns, has reached the final round of judging in the International Photography Awards and has been chosen as an Official Selection. Winners will be announced in late August. Fingers crossed.

Photo of the Week

Deep beneath a glacier in Svalbard, I found this delicate sculpture suspended inside a cave without a trace of natural light. In the darkness, it was almost invisible. Only when I began to illuminate it carefully did its improbable architecture emerge: thin ribbons of ice, translucent hooks, tapering blades, and small frozen curves that seemed drawn rather than formed.

Photographing it required moving slowly. The ice was fragile, the cave utterly black, and every change in the position of the light transformed the sculpture. Against the darkness, the ice appeared to float, its tiny bubbles and internal fractures catching the light like dust suspended in glass.

It felt less like discovering a geological formation than entering a hidden gallery beneath the glacier, where water, cold, gravity, and time had collaborated on a work no one was meant to see.

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Diatoms are tiny single-celled algae found almost anywhere there is water. Smaller than the width of a human hair, they live in oceans, lakes, rivers, wetlands, damp soils, and even on the surfaces of plants. Each one is enclosed within a rigid cell wall made primarily from silica—the same material found in glass. This shell, known as a frustule, is composed of two interlocking halves, rather like a tiny box with a lid.

Despite their microscopic size, diatoms have an enormous environmental impact. Through photosynthesis, they absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen. Collectively, marine diatoms are responsible for a significant portion of the oxygen produced on Earth. They also form a foundation of aquatic food webs, feeding zooplankton and, indirectly, many of the fish, seabirds, and marine mammals that depend upon them.

Photographing a diatom is a meeting of biology, optics, and patience.

The first challenge is scale. At high magnification only a thin slice of the subject can be sharply focused at one time. A diatom may look flat, but its surface contains depth: raised ridges, curved edges, internal structures, and layers of silica. A single exposure will often leave much of it soft or indistinct.

To overcome this, I use focus stacking. The microscope’s focus is advanced in extremely small increments, and a photograph is made at each position. One frame may record the upper surface, another the central structures, and another the lower edge. Depending on the magnification and the subject, the final image may be assembled from dozens of separate photographs.

Specialized software then identifies the sharpest areas from each frame and combines them into a single image with a depth of field that would be impossible to capture in one exposure. The process is precise. If the focus intervals are too large, detail is missed. If the specimen moves, or if vibration enters the system, the entire stack may become unusable.

Dark field illumination adds another layer of complexity—and another kind of beauty.

In conventional bright-field microscopy, light passes directly through the specimen, producing a bright background. This is great for scientific study, but it doesn’t show the diatoms the way I see them - tiny ocean jewels!

Dark field microscopy is a technique where light is blocked from entering the microscope directly. Only the light that is scattered, refracted, or diffracted by the diatom reaches the camera. The background becomes black, while the silica shell appears to glow.

Edges flare into brightness. Fine perforations become visible. Transparent structures take on the appearance of stars, frost, or illuminated glass.

The technique is technically demanding because there is far less light available. Exposure times become longer, alignment must be exact, and high-magnification objectives can be difficult to illuminate evenly. Dust, scratches, and tiny imperfections also become painfully obvious.

But when everything works, a creature invisible to the unaided eye becomes monumental.

The resulting photograph is both a scientific record and a portrait. It reminds me that complexity is not dependent on size, and that beauty does not require an audience. Long before microscopes existed, diatoms were already constructing their glass houses in oceans and lakes, producing oxygen, storing carbon, and quietly sustaining life on Earth.

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Mid-morning light moves sideways across the Okavango Delta, tracing the curved backs of red lechwe as they graze through the flooded grassland. Their russet coats catch the sun while their legs dissolve into reeds, reflections and pale water. Grass stems cross antlers; ripples echo the animals’ movement; one body overlaps another until the herd becomes part of a larger visual rhythm. In this fleeting side light, water, vegetation and animal are no longer separate subjects, but a single intricate pattern shaped by the wetland.

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From above, Iceland’s braided rivers look almost biological. Thin channels split apart, weave back together, and branch again across vast black sand plains. At first glance, they seem chaotic. Look longer, and a different pattern emerges.

These rivers aren’t random. They’re constantly solving a problem.

Fed by glacial meltwater, braided rivers carry enormous amounts of sediment. A single channel can’t contain it all, so the river divides into many paths. As gravel is deposited, the flow shifts. New channels form while old ones disappear. Every movement changes the conditions for the next.

The river is continuously adapting.

That doesn’t make it intelligent in the human sense. But it does reveal a kind of physical intelligence: a system responding to changing conditions without a central plan.

Nature relies on this strategy more often than we realize. Tree roots, fungal networks, blood vessels, and even our own neurons all emerge from countless local interactions rather than top-down control. Complex order arises not because someone designed every detail, but because simple rules, repeated over time, create resilient systems.

Braided rivers belong to that family.

What fascinates me most is how they reshape our intuition about time.

We often imagine time flowing like a single river—from past to future along one continuous course. Braided rivers suggest something different. At any moment, multiple paths coexist. Tiny changes—a shifting gravel bar or a surge of meltwater—can redirect the entire system.

Looking backward, the river’s course seems inevitable. Looking forward, it remains open.

That feels surprisingly familiar.

Our lives, careers, and even history often work the same way. We tend to see only one path in retrospect, forgetting how many alternatives once existed.

Iceland makes this visible because its landscape is still being built. Glaciers grind volcanic rock into fine sediment, floods redraw river channels, and entire stretches of the landscape are remade within a single season. Change isn’t an interruption—it’s the process itself.

Perhaps that’s the deeper lesson of braided rivers.

We often equate stability with permanence. Nature suggests otherwise. A braided river remains recognizable not because its channels stay fixed, but because they keep adapting. Its identity comes from continuous adjustment, not rigid form.

Maybe resilience works the same way.

The most enduring systems—whether rivers, ecosystems, or societies—aren’t those that resist change. They’re the ones that can reorganize without losing themselves.

Standing beside one of Iceland’s braided rivers, it’s impossible to say exactly where the river is. The channels are always shifting. And yet, somehow, the river persists.

Not despite the motion, but because of it.

Recent News

• Here is a virtual tour of my new gallery show at Maven Gallery.

Photo of the Week

Above Lake Sabrina in California’s Eastern Sierra, the Milky Way rises between the mountains and spills across the still water. Much of this light has traveled for roughly 25,000 years to reach us—beginning its journey before the first cities, before written language, before almost everything we think of as human history. To stand beneath it is to feel wonder in its purest form: the sudden recognition that we are both impossibly small and profoundly connected to something vast, ancient, and still arriving.

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Georgia O’Keeffe wrote, “To see takes time.” I have come to believe that conservation begins there.

Before policy, before activism, before science, before outrage, there is attention. There is the quiet act of looking long enough for the world to become more than scenery.

Most of us move through nature too quickly. A beach is a beach. A tree is a tree. A river is a river. We name things, and then, in a way, stop seeing them.

This is what photography has taught me: attention changes the world because it changes our relationship to the world.

When we look closely, nature stops being an abstraction. It becomes specific. Intimate. Harder to dismiss.

Much of the environmental conversation begins with crisis, and rightly so. We are living through climate disruption, habitat loss, extinction, fire, drought, and ecological unraveling. But crisis alone does not always lead to care. Sometimes it overwhelms us. Sometimes it makes the living world feel too damaged, too vast, too distant to reach.

Wonder works differently.

Wonder brings us closer. It asks us to slow down. It asks us to notice. It gives us a relationship before it gives us a responsibility. And that relationship matters, because people rarely fight for what they have not first come to love.

My work in Patterns: Art of the Natural World grew out of this belief. Across scales, from aerial landscapes to microscopic structures, I kept seeing the same visual language appear again and again: branching, spiraling, flowing, cracking, repeating. Rivers echoed leaves. Mineral formations resembled planets. Ice looked like skin. The small and the vast seemed to be speaking in the same grammar.

These patterns are not decoration. They are evidence of relationship. They are the marks left by energy, pressure, growth, erosion, gravity, time, and life itself.

To see them is to remember that the Earth is not a collection of separate objects. It is a system. We are inside it, not outside it.

That recognition is where conservation begins.

Not in abstraction, but in intimacy.

Not in guilt, but in attention.

Not in the impossible idea of “saving the planet,” but in learning to see the particular: this river, this beetle, this tidepool, this tree, this patch of lichen, this living world in front of us.

The first act of conservation is not a grand gesture.

It is learning to look.

And, as O’Keeffe knew, looking takes time.

Recent News

• My Elements of Wonder show opened last night at The Maven Gallery in Wichita.

• Dan Ginn from Them Frames interviewed me a couple of weeks ago. We talked in depth about three of my photos - one old, one new, and one personal. I love this format!

Photo of the Week

In southern Iceland, glacial rivers don’t move in straight lines. They loosen, divide, return, and divide again, carrying volcanic sediment across black sand until the landscape begins to look less like geography and more like a living nervous system. From above, the braid becomes a kind of natural calligraphy: turquoise meltwater writing its way through orange earth, each channel shaped by flow, resistance, gravity, and time. What I love about these places is that they reveal nature not as static scenery, but as motion made visible. The river is drawing itself, moment by moment, across the land.

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There is a strange moment that happens when you look at something in nature long enough.

At first, you see the thing itself. Then, if you stay with it, the object begins to loosen. It stops being only itself. The beach becomes a map. The river becomes a vein. The mineral becomes a landscape.

A tree does not insist that you look at it. But if you do, it rewards you.

You begin with the trunk. Then the branching. Then the smaller branching. Then the pattern of leaves. Then the gaps between the leaves. Then the way light moves through them. Then the shadows. Then the wind. Then the realization that the tree is not a thing, but a set of relationships: soil, water, air, sunlight, fungus, time.

The brain loves this. Not because it is simple, but because it is coherent.

That coherence matters. Natural patterns often sit in a special zone between order and surprise. They are neither monotonous nor chaotic. Repetition is not decorative. It is a clue.

These patterns tell us that the same forces keep writing themselves into the world: flow, pressure, growth, erosion, gravity, competition, adaptation, time.

Our brains evolved inside this grammar. Long before we had written language, we were reading landscapes. We needed to notice the difference between healthy and stagnant water, safe and exposed terrain, edible and dangerous plants, animal movement, weather changes, seasonal timing, shelter, threat, and opportunity.

Pattern recognition was not a luxury. It was survival.

So when we look at nature, some ancient part of the brain experiences a kind of homecoming. The world is complex, but legible. There is information everywhere, but much of it is embodied, rhythmic, and relational.

This is why certain natural forms feel calming without being boring. Fractal patterns, structures that repeat at different scales, appear throughout nature: trees, rivers, clouds, mountains, lungs, blood vessels, coastlines. Research has shown that looking at some natural fractal patterns can increase alpha brain activity, which is associated with a wakefully relaxed state.

That phrase, wakefully relaxed, feels exactly right to me.

Recent News

• On Friday July 10th I’ll be opening my Elements of Wonder at Maven Gallery with a reception at 6pm.

• On Saturday July 11th I’ll be speaking about my work at The Exploration Place in Wichita. Get tickets here.

Photo of the Week

In this photograph of Karlinn off the Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland, the sea stack sits like a dark anchor beneath a sky alive with movement. Above it, the northern lights sweep across the night in green veils, while the moon burns through a luminous 22-degree halo, a circular ring formed as light passes through ice crystals suspended high in the atmosphere. The effect is almost otherworldly: ocean, rock, moonlight, aurora, and atmosphere all briefly aligned. What might have been a simple coastal scene becomes something larger—a reminder that Iceland’s landscapes are shaped not only by lava and sea, but by light, weather, and the vast invisible forces moving overhead.

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I thought I was just doing a little book.

That sounds absurd now, but it is honestly how it felt at the beginning. Patterns: Art of the Natural World began as a quiet, personal project: a way of making sense of the natural world through repetition, rhythm, structure, and attention. I imagined it as a beautiful object, yes, but also a modest one. A book for people who care about photography, nature, conservation, and the strange visual intelligence of the Earth.

I did not imagine opening my laptop one morning and seeing the work on the homepage of National Geographic. Yes … that National Geographic!

And then the press became a weather system.

I would wake up and someone would send me a link. Then another. Then another. A friend in one country would say, “I saw your book here.” Someone else would send a screenshot from somewhere else. Major international outlets, photography publications, science and culture media, podcasts, newsletters — the book was traveling in places I had never anticipated. A photograph that had once been made quietly, alone, in the field, was now moving farther than I ever could.

I think the response to the book meant so much to me because it is evidence that the underlying idea was landing. People seemed hungry for a way to see a version of the natural world that was not about crisis, loss, and doom — even though those realities are urgent and real. They wanted beauty, but not empty beauty. They wanted beauty connected to wonder and meaning.

The response also drove book sales. Before the book was even available in the USA I received the email that every author dreams about: We need to reprint. ASAP

The reprint feels lovely. But it’s not really the point.

The point is that there are lots of other people who care about our shared home as much as I do.

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The Explorers Club, founded in 1904, it is a place built around a very old human impulse: the need to go out, look closely, return with stories, and expand the boundaries of what others can imagine. Its members have reached the South Pole, the summit of Everest, the deepest point in the ocean, and the surface of the Moon. The walls hold flags from expeditions you learned about in school. The artifacts in the cases are not replicas. The history in the club is not decorative — it is structural. You feel it the moment you walk in.

The lecture hall was packed, which surprised and moved me. There is always a strange vulnerability in standing before people with work that has taken years to make. Photographs are quiet things when you make them. You are usually alone, waiting for light, watching a pattern form and dissolve, trying to decide before the world changes again. Then suddenly those private moments are projected large in a room full of strangers.

But the audience leaned in.

The questions afterward were some of the most thoughtful I’ve had. People asked about the line between documentation and emotion, between science and abstraction. They asked whether seeking beauty alone is enough to move us toward care.

This last question is the core of what I was trying to share that night. Not just a collection of photographs, but a case for attention as its own form of exploration. The natural world is full of intelligence — structural, temporal, relational — and most of it goes unseen. Not because it is hidden, but because we are moving too fast to notice.

We cannot protect what we have not learned to see.

The great expeditions are not over. They have changed shape. The frontier is still out there — in the canopy of a forest, in the skin of a mineral, in a drop of seawater, in the relationship between one pattern and another across scales we are only beginning to understand.

There is a moment—somewhere between the dream and the cardboard box on your doorstep—when a book stops being an idea and becomes an object.

For years, Patterns: Art of the Natural World existed as a loose constellation: images and folders, edits and sequences, rejected sequences, notes—and a quiet conviction that there was something worth making whole.

It started in the simplest possible way: by looking more closely.

In the early pandemic, I kept returning to the same stretch of beach near my home in Northern California. Nothing exotic—just sand, water, foam, wind, and light. But the more I looked, the more I saw.

Each tide redrew the shoreline. Foam became calligraphy. Sand became topography. Water left behind branching forms like rivers seen from the air. A few square feet of beach began to feel like an entire visual universe.

That practice—returning, looking harder, letting the familiar become strange again—became the seed of the book.

Over time, the work expanded outward. I began noticing the same structures everywhere: braided rivers, ice, minerals, salt lakes, animal movement, kelp forests, fossils, algae, microscopic life. The project moved across continents and scales, from vast aerial landscapes to details barely visible without magnification.

And somewhere along the way, I convinced myself I had a book.

Over a year later, the first copy arrived.

After years of making images, editing, sequencing, writing, designing, doubting, revising, and waiting, there it was: a cardboard box, a book inside, and the impossible feeling that something that lived in my head for so long now existed in the world without me.

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