The Morning the Sky Looked Back
The first thing I remember about the mornings wasn’t the ocean.
It was the chickens.
They were everywhere—wandering around the trail, scratching at the ground, crowing like they had been assigned the morning shift. People fed them, talked to them, and mostly just accepted them as part of the scenery. After a while, you did too.
We were in Hawaii, and right outside our window was the ocean. That alone made every morning feel a little different. I could step outside, get on the trail, and have the water beside me almost immediately.
One evening, I took this photograph.
The original moment was already beautiful, but later I started wondering what else might have been hiding inside it.
So I changed the light.
The sunset became green—not completely impossible, but strange enough to make the whole scene feel like it belonged somewhere just a little beyond reality. I let a whale rise out of the water. Birds crossed the sky.
And then I gave the clouds something they normally don’t have.
Eyes.
Not angry eyes. Not even frightening ones.
Just watching.
That changed everything.
Suddenly the ocean felt larger. The sky felt alive. The whale no longer seemed like the biggest thing in the picture.
And that is one of the things I enjoy most about making these images. I don’t have to replace the memory. Hawaii is still there. The trail is still there. The ocean outside our window is still there.
Even those noisy chickens are still part of the story.
I just gave that evening another possibility.
Maybe that is what imagination does best.
It doesn’t always create a new world.
Sometimes it just looks at the one we already have—and notices that the sky has been looking back.
The Web We Found in the Desert
This one started at Red Rock, outside Las Vegas.
My son Kyle and I were out walking on one of those days when the desert feels almost empty. You could go a long way without seeing anybody. We had picked a good time of year too, so the heat wasn’t beating you down and you could actually slow down and look around.
That was the best part.
We were walking through all these different desert plants when I spotted this strange webbed mass covered with caterpillars. I remember looking at it and thinking, That can’t be real.
There were so many of them, all gathered together inside this web-like structure, that it looked more like something from another planet than something growing naturally in the Nevada desert.
To this day, I still don’t know exactly what they were. Some kind of caterpillar, obviously, but I never knew what they eventually became. Butterflies? Moths? Something else entirely?
Maybe not knowing is better.
Years later, when I came back to the photograph, I didn’t want to simply recreate what I saw. I wanted to recreate what it felt like to see it for the first time.
So the web became luminous. The caterpillars became residents of their own tiny glowing world. Little lights appeared around them, almost like fireflies moving through a forest at night.
The strange part is, the original scene was already doing most of the work.
I just gave it the world I imagined was hiding inside it.
