My interest in photography did not begin with books or mentors, or with any burning desire to see the world through a camera. It evolved from an intense devotion to mountains and wilderness that eventually shaped all the parts of my life and brought them together.

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

I think that cognitive scientists would support the view that our visual system does not directly represent what is out there in the world and that our brain constructs a lot of the imagery that we believe we are seeing.

A lot of people think that when you have grand scenery, such as you have in Yosemite, that photography must be easy.

The most interesting parts of the natural world are the edges, places where ocean meets land, meadow meets forest, timberline touches the heights.

And most of my early pictures failed but about one in a 100 somehow looked better than what I saw.

Small, portable digital cameras that exceed the performance of an off-the-shelf Nikon using 35mm slide film are further away from current reality than the proposed NASA manned Mars mission, although I expect both to happen sometime during my lifetime.