These photographs have been taken over many years while working in many different countries. What ties them together is the belief that everywhere you look, if you truly look, you will find interesting, sometimes amazing, things that you never noticed before. You will see familiar things in a new light, and other times you will see something completely new. You just need to look.
And once you see these things, if you truly look at them, you can form a connection. You start to understand that the world is not just about you, your family, friends, or other people at all. You begin to appreciate the other individuals that surround us: trees, insects, spiders, frogs, snakes, plants, mammals, birds, fish and on and on. If you look very closely at these individuals, you start to see incredible details, patterns, colors, structures. (Please, just look; you should not move, bother, hassle or in any way stress them out. How would you like it?).
Once you have started down this road, you begin to notice behaviors as well. You can watch a bud opening, a bird teaching its babies to fly, a squirrel learning to jump from branch to branch, ants carrying food, spiders dragging a wasp, and dragonflies returning to the same twig to eat. And finally you can start to see personality and emotion. You see patience, as the eagles teach their little ones to hunt. Worry when a baby bird cries. Fear in an insect when you come too close. Determination when ants rebuild their anthill. Joy in a dog running outside. Curiosity from a monkey observing our actions.
There are things everywhere that you never even think about. The most interesting things in life are not on your phone. You have to look. It doesn’t matter if you know the scientific name of what you see. It doesn’t even matter if you know what it is at all. The point is to see it, really see it, and be amazed. Then when you feel connected, you will want to learn more, and you will want to protect these individuals from our careless actions.
Photography is a way we can connect with things. It lets us see small details, whether on an insect, or on the face of the earth. Looking at these things seems like the most amazing privilege. Like being let in on a secret. You say to yourself, “I can’t believe I am seeing this!”. It is the best way to feel like time has stopped.
When you look through this website, look at the photos and think about how incredible these individuals are, and how amazing is the earth. For so many of these photos, we worked in hard conditions in the field, or flew over the earth in a plane. It is always an amazing experience. But so many spectacular things are in your own backyard. Or in the park down the way. Or on a bush or tree. You just need to look. So please, look at the photos, and then go outside.
