Locked Down Looking Up started as a series of images made over time from a fixed point—outside my front door—during the San Francisco Bay Area’s lockdown to slow the spread of Covid-19. Multiple shots were combined to show the flight trails of birds, insects, and bats. While most everything in my life had come to a standstill, up in the air, there was still a lot going on. This project was the subject of my TED talk, also available as a book: https://www.blurb.com/b/11949191-locked-down-looking-up

My house was recently destroyed by a fire that turned it into something like an archaeological dig for my own history.

Along with anyone else who's witnessed one, I’m fascinated by starling murmurations and have been trying to shoot them for years. But I’m always a little too late, or too far away, or it’s getting too dark. In 2020 I got lucky. Each of these photographs is a composite of hundreds or thousands of images made over the course of a few seconds or minutes, showing the birds’ flight paths.

This started out as a slightly whimsical series about the ways that little animal toys left around the house can sometimes surprise me. As I worked on it, it evolved into something sadder, threaded with the knowledge that little plastic models of some animals will be the only kind our children's children may have. I'm now focusing on threatened and endangered animals. Sadly, that list is so long that it really doesn't limit my options at all.

Datura and Brugmansia flowers, both of the Solanaceae plant family, release their powerful scent at night. They contain a hallucinogen and a poison that will stop the heart. The flowers last only a day and are as interesting on the inside as they are from below, above, and to the side.

Explorations of various natural objects in darkness, organized by subject.

After photographing many natural objects in darkness, I wondered what would happen if the colors were inverted—like a film negative. The result was, of course, light.

Red-green color blindness affects about seven or eight percent of American men, and most predatory animals. Do they have some advantage in seeing the world on a more level chromatic playing field, eliminating both the fiery end of the spectrum and the calming middle? Or are they just missing something the rest of us can't imagine doing without? These are part of a series of photographs of flowers in conventionally feminine, sensual colors, mainly red and pink, with hues shifted to approximate, for the rest of us, the way they might appear to people with severe red-green colorblindness. 

This is what I do to get back into the third dimension after a lot of digital work.

I'm Searching for Something So Undefined:

Poetry found in the Cloud is a book of found poems I put together in the late 1990s, when google was relatively new and the only things you could search for on Amazon were books. I finished it days before the 2000 dot-com crash in San Francisco. The publisher I showed it to said, "It's a beautiful book and it should be published but we're not going near anything that has the stink of the Internet on it right now." So I self-published it. I was honored to be asked to read from it at San Francisco's "LitQuake" literary festival in 2014. Now there's a thing people call "google poetry." This isn't that; it's more intentional and structured.