With an SLR, there is strange and deep magic in the fact that the mirror flips up when you take the picture, so the one instant that gets captured is one that you never saw through the viewfinder.

Photography is almost a reflex for me: the end product is not really as important as the process -- carrying a camera forces me to look at the world in a different way. The act of photographing is the act of forcing yourself to adapt to a new perspective.

The world is overwhelmingly full of beauty and fascination. One of my professors once said to me "if you know how to look at light, you'll never be bored." I was too young and arrogant for such wisdom: as a student of physics, I thought "but everything you look at is, by definition, reflected light." Now I ponder the profundity of that professor's words nearly every day. It's hypnotic and compelling -- the drift of a shadow; the caustics of light through a glass of wine; the delicate diffusion of light across a unfolding leaf...