With my father an avid fisherman and my aunt a Girl Scout leader, I was introduced to the outdoors at a young age. As a boy growing up in Oregon, Hawaii, and the Eastern Sierras, I was shown and told of many hidden, beautiful places. I grew first into hiking, then backpacking, then climbing, and finally international travel in my adulthood.

In my early 20s, I started taking a camera with me in order to record my adventures. I quickly became bored with routine scenic photography and photographers who simply copied shots by Ansel Adams, Ray Atkeson, Eliot Porter, and others. Those great photographers were as much explorers as masters of their craft, searching for the uncaptured beauty of our world and sharing it with others. It was this thinking, the desire to explore, that came first for me.

Capturing it on film was simply a form of documentation which grew into a hobby. Eventually my hobby grew into a serious endeavor; carrying a 4x5 field camera with a tripod and multiple lenses into the wild, searching, trying to capture scenes of nature rarely shown on postcards and in picture books.

While not lucrative, this labor of love, born from the desire for exploration, is an endeavor that will always be a part of my life. When not out taking photos, climbing, and exploring, I earn a living in digital imaging, and have recently forayed into learning and working with digital video.

Contact Phil at snowleopard@coho.net