Black and White

Black and white - or at least close to it. I like the simple purity of these images

Stark

An editing “accident” while proofing Alone 2023—the same original image—led me to appreciate the great tonal contrasts of this abandoned house in Clyde, Washington.

Nearly two feet of snow fell on the Cascades this March day – we had to drive several hundred miles through White Pass to get back to Index, but that’s another story. Snowshoeing at the lake gave us this vignette of Emerald Island at the source of the Wenatchee River.

Snow Bridge 2026

Same day as Snow Island at Lake Wenatchee. Snow and low light make it hard to tell this is not a black and white image. I refused to adjust the bridge tint, better to reflect quiet snow and the late winter on a snowshoe hike with my daughter in the Cascades.

Reading

We spent a day touring the south coast of Iceland. Vik is famous for its church, its black sand beaches and its puffins. But this woman reading alone on the basalt columns at the beach was a striking contrast that needed no color adjustments at all.

Silver Lightning

At the Best of the Northwest 2025, a friend asked if I’d considered wokring with Birches 2015 in black and white. It was a great idea – the trees are radiant against that high New Mexico winter desert sky.

Yukon 2026

Driving through the Yukon the day after our wedding, Michelle and I stopped along the shore of Tutshi Lake. The view wasn't obvious from the roadside, hidden behind a band of scrub brush, but we suspected there was something special beyond it. Without a drone, we improvised by mounting the camera on a fifteen-foot painter's pole and raising it above the vegetation. Michelle held and rotated the pole while I framed the composition remotely, making this photograph a true collaboration. The effort revealed a sweeping view of lake, forest, and mountain, shaped by immense geological forces over thousands of years.

Carcross 2026

Carcross Desert is an ancient dry lake in the Yukon, and Michelle and I shot this (again) from a painter’s pole atop a dune on a clear September afternoon. I’ve long been fascinated with infrared film, so I used an infrared filter to bring out the sky’s depth and the radiance of the pines. Another image from my Alaska/Yukon honeymoon series.

Trespass 2026

On that October sunrise morning, I circled around to photograph the Thrall station from the road. The old canopy and its two columns looked better straight on, especially in black and white. There's a No Trespassing sign beside the entrance, which seems a little optimistic given the condition of the building. Still, there are plenty of unknown histories and untold journeys from this place.

Collapsing 2026

The roof is broken, boards are missing, and I'm not sure what's keeping parts of this old service station in Thrall, Washington, standing. I photographed it a few minutes after sunrise, on a freezing October morning near Yakima Canyon, shooting toward the east with the sun coming through the big tree behind the building. Black and white seemed right for this one, especially with the contrast between the failing wooden addition and the station beside it.