Photographing secrets and textures of the forest
Wanting to escape the heat of the city yet again, going to over 7,200 feet in elevation to the forest surrounding the San Antonio Campground in the Jemez Valley area of New Mexico, brief relief was found walking among the tall trees and the moss covered rocks. Naturally I had my camera with me, and wanted to look for secrets and textures of the forest. I recently learned a new term for fallen trees, dead fall. How the tree in the above photo came to rest like that in a dead fall of horizontal symmetry is such a secret I was looking for. Large rocks sat in isolation with moss growing on them, and being mostly in desert areas of New Mexico, these were not often seen textures with life clinging and growing to the rocks. I imagine to the moss and such on these rocks, each rock feels like its own planet in a galaxy of trees.
Read MoreWandering makes photos
If anyone asks me how did I learn photography, I tell them, by walking the streets of Tokyo for hundreds of hours with my very first DSLR camera, a Nikon D80. What is great about living in a city with wide spread public transportation is you can take a train to one area, walk randomly to where your eyes take you, then just hop on another train and get back home without having to worry about returning to where your car is parked. This is how I went about finding one of my more famous photos, at least in Japan, which I titled, “Last Green Leaves Before Autumn.” I submitted it to Metropolis Magazine (the largest weekly English magazine in Japan) and they featured it in the Photo of the Week section. Picking up a copy of the magazine the Friday afternoon it came out and seeing my photo featured inside, I was stunned and even stopped strangers passing by to say (in English), “that’s my photo!” It was a moment of exhileration I have rarely ever felt again.
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