I began photographing wildlife not as an artist, but as a researcher — chasing data, not light. Somewhere along the fault line between field notes and frame lines, the two disciplines merged. Every photograph I make still starts with a question: what is this creature, this place, actually doing, and why?

Four decades later, that question has taken me from the tidal marshes of the Gulf Coast to the high alpine of the Rockies, and eventually, indoors, to the quiet discipline of ceramics — where the same patience required to wait for an owl to turn its head serves just as well waiting for a glaze to cure.

I still work the way I was trained: observe first, interpret second. A frame is only worth keeping if it tells the truth about the animal or the landscape in it — no baiting, no staging, no shortcuts. The same rule now governs the studio. A pot goes back on the wheel if it flatters the clay instead of listening to it.