I use an Olympus CAMEDIA digital 575 zoom. Small enough to fit in my pants pocket in my travels. I am a peripatetic, seeking visual beauty as I go, wherever I go. The zoom works well to capture architectural details up high on a building or views of distant mountains or natural details that are across a steep ravine. A close-up feature allows shots of, say, wildflowers or wild mushrooms up to a 7 inch range.

The digital "eye" is a mechanical eye giving focus to all the various depths in the field of vision. In that respect it is unlike our natural eye that is constantly adjusting focus, charting our way as we enter the visual field, walking or driving, for example. In digital, a close-up frame for more distant views will mimic this natural fucus function of the eye and give life to the photo. The digital point and click camera has a difficult time with, say, complex cityscapes. But if you provide a clearly focused foreground for the eye, the lack of definition of the scape will not seem so obvious. Example: www.flickr.com/photos/9405610@N02/3685968097/

The sense of steep decline is difficult to express in digital, for the reasons given above. Here's an example of how to get around that: www.flickr.com/photos/9405610@N02/3613468428/ in/set-72157... Only the "doll house" scale of the picnic tables puts you up on the vertigo inducing steep bluff high above the scene.

Sadly, one thing my little digital cannot do well is nature photography of birds and insects. You have only to scan through flickr to discover the riches that more sophisticated cameras can bring to photography.

Excessive photo processing diminishes the presence of the subject, making it a "picture" and not a "photo". I love Cartier-Bresson's "Capturing the Moment" aesthetic. If you get it right in the first place all you need is a little cropping to make sure your composition is centered or adjusting exposure to make sure the light is right.. That's the "art" of photography: finding the vantage point, through imagination, where the subject will look great, "composed", interesting, expressive. Eventually as you get to know the possibilities of your camera. Its "eye" becomes a virtual eye in your mind and your imagination will lead you to the sweet spot for a cool shot. I love it when the two dimensional and three dimensional compositions come together in unsuspected and beautiful ways to thrill the eye.

My photography is an expression of my understanding of Civilization. But how do you define "Civilization"? In fact are we not undergoing a radical re-definition of civilization? Identities, so firmly rooted in Nation and Religion, have broken out from their narrow mold. The internet allows a student in Madrid to play Bridge with an elderly couple in China. Photo sharing creates virtual communities of people throughout the world with a similar visual outlook. A gay couple are married in Massachusetts and raise a family of perfectly normal children. The 24 hour news cycle brings the world together and sends political hacks scurrying. Xenophobes and Chauvinists shrink to a paranoid, indefensible corner for not joining the new civilization. Sadly, the old paradigms die a painful death for many people or follow them tenaciously to the bitter end.

But it goes beyond that. Ecologists speak of "biological communities", plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, that have carved out a niche somewhere in our natural world, achieving accommodation, symbiotic interrelationships, micro-climate utilization. I suggest that we extend the notion of civilization to include biological communities. After all, these are the underpinnings, the sine qua non of human civilization. We have come to a new civility and reverence for nature and natural history, one that makes the closed-end religious sense of holiness seem puny and near-sighted and race/nation forms of self identity seem like so much servitude. In the 1820's, Ralph Waldo Emerson made a prescient observation: "'Know thyself' and 'Study nature' should be fused into one maxim" I am at home both in the canyons of the mountains and the canyons of the city. My friends are dwellers in the city and dwellers in wild nature.