What is photography? Literally, it is "writing with light," since the word comes from the Greek words photos (light) and graphos (writing), although most photographers think of it as "painting with light," which has a closer association with the visual arts. In any event, photography is about nothing, if it isn't about light. Humans perceive and comprehend the world largely through their eyes, and the quality of light at any given moment (its color, intensity, direction and degree of diffusion) has a powerful influence on our feelings about our environment.

This particular scene would not look the same in the brilliant, direct light of midday or under a heavily overcast sky. In fact, it appeared this way for only a brief moment, changing constantly as the sun rose above the horizon beneath a blanket of clouds. At such moments, the spirit thrills: It's a new day; the world is coming alive again! The photographic challenge is to capture and express those feelings; to create a painting, in effect, with the light on the land that reflects our emotions at that moment.

To speak more personally about this, such observations are particularly poignant to me. My father was a very "visual" person, an industrial designer by trade and an aficionado of photography. But at the age of 35 (when I was nine), he was completely blinded by diabetic retinopathy. As his oldest child, in a sense I became his eyes; we often traveled together, and he would ask me to describe to him what I was seeing. My job was to try to do that in a way that would help him form mental images, vicariously. I don't know that I did that very well, but the challenge of trying to do that has led directly to my interest in photography -- to my attempts to capture visually some of my feelings and observations about the world and share them with others.