Landscape photography has taken me across most of the wild places in North America and deep into South America. These landscape photos span decades of work in the mountains, valleys, rivers, and coastlines that I keep coming back to. The Alaska Range and Brooks Range in winter light. The Andes rising above Torres del Paine in Patagonia. The Canadian Rockies stacked up in layers of blue ridgeline after blue ridgeline. Red rock and desert light in the American Southwest. The ancient, rounded, fog-draped ridges of the Appalachians. Each place has its own quality of light, its own mood, and its own way of humbling you when you think you've figured it out.
The western mountains are where I spend most of my time. Alaska's landscapes are enormous and empty in a way that changes how you think about scale. A valley that looks like a twenty-minute walk turns out to be a full day. The light in the high latitudes is low and warm for hours, raking across glaciers and tundra in ways that don't happen further south. Patagonia has a similar quality but with a violence to the weather that keeps you on your toes. I've watched a perfectly still morning at the Torres turn into horizontal rain in fifteen minutes. The Canadian Rockies split the difference: massive, dramatic, and accessible enough that you can work a location repeatedly until the conditions line up.
The Appalachians are a different kind of landscape photography entirely. The mountains are older, softer, and wrapped in hardwood forest that filters and scatters light in ways the open western ranges don't. Morning fog in the Blue Ridge or the Smokies creates images with a quiet mood that you simply can't replicate in big alpine terrain. I grew up photographing landscapes in these kinds of places before I ever saw a glacier or a 14,000-foot peak, and I still think some of my best light has been in those eastern valleys.
What connects all of these landscape photos is patience and weather. The images in this gallery that I'm proudest of weren't made on bluebird afternoons. They came from storms breaking apart at sunset, from fog burning off a river at first light, from snow squalls clearing just long enough to reveal a mountain that had been hidden all day. Landscape photography rewards the people who stay out when everyone else goes inside.
