Caesar Pavese, an Italian aphorist, says that in order to discover many things, one must look for just one thing. I spend my days looking for light, and in doing that I have found most of the other things that are important in my creative trajectory.

Light. It is the ingredient that matters most in a good photo. The background, what amateurs usually look for first, is immaterial if the light is bad. But with good light, a lackluster background will fall away. It will become what its name implies - just a background. When light takes center stage, all the supporting elements fall into place, until one hardly realizes why the whole is so excellent. It is a composition bound together with light. I spent the first several years of my photography journey trying to pose people well, including interesting props and finding “cool” backgrounds. But when I started thinking about the light first, suddenly my photography leapt forward. And the winter that I made it my purpose to record light in the season that has the least of it, my work changed again. Now that I have trained my eye to look for light, I see it everywhere. And when it falls just right, nothing else matters.