Typically I see it with photographers who go to a place like India or Nepal, and everything's so colorful and exotic and they think, therefore, a picture's been taken.

...just like some people's instinct to photograph is triggered by vacation... assignments might be that to me and that's why I've built my life around assignments. That was the way to live the photographic life.

I was asked by a student what my most significant accomplishment was at National Geographic, after thirty years, and I said that my career came to an appropriate close, and I still loved photography. Not everybody who spends their career at anything ends up fascinated and involved with it.

That's who comes to my workshops. I jokingly tell my students that the class could be called "Your photographs: Better."

I now want to be a photographer of my time, and our common culture.

The best lesson I was given is that all of life teaches, especially if we have that expectation.

How the visual world appears is important to me. I'm always aware of the light. I'm always aware of what I would call the 'deep composition.' Photography in the field is a process of creation, of thought and technique. But ultimately, it's an act of imaginatively seeing from within yourself.