My first thought is always of light.

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.

We mountaineers always live with the feeling that we came on the scene too late.

When the light is right and everything is working for me, I feel as tense as when making a difficult maneuver high on a mountain. A minute - and sometimes mere seconds - can make the difference between a superb image and a mundane one.

If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better.

I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.

I began taking pictures in the natural world to be able to show people what I was experiencing when I climbed and explored in Yosemite in the High Sierra.