Zion! Such a blue infinity of sky! And shadows of mountains creeping up the face of other mountains, and covering the trees with a more saturated green.

Max Beckman said, “Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.”

A cold day for early August in the Cascades! Cloudy, windy, threatening rain all day. But dramatic, yes! Broken Top, the dead volcano, seemed almost to be coming back to life, with clouds rising out of its shattered core.

One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt. — Georgia O’Keeffe

There were no clouds there when we crawled into our tents to go to sleep. And no clouds throughout the starry night when I peaked out the flap of the tent. But sure enough in the morning there were clouds, banked all the way from the gorgeous Goat Rocks Wilderness, where we were backpacking, to Mt. Adams in the distance.

Much distance in light values, too, from the dark foreground to the sunlit background. I’ve been following some debate on the internet about the value of HDR (see here, for instance, at Scott Bourne’s photofocus blog). And it’s true– there’s some really bad, hypersaturated, noisy HDR out there. Much of it seems to aim at the look of a video game image. Which is fine if you like that kind of thing. I’m more interested in honoring the world as I see it. And rendering this scene as I saw it would have been nigh impossible without HDR.

I found this hyper-embellished wall in Siena, Italy, one day, just strolling with my camera. I love the triangles drawn on the wall on the right, the red filigree banner of  mythological animals (griffins? chimera?), and the richly colored roof tiles.

“I want to know one thing,” said Picasso. “What is color?”

Wonder into wonder existence opens. — Lao Tzo

Colors are brighter when the mind is open.– Adriana Alarcon

For me, this photograph evokes all the lure of faraway places — the startling blue sky, the bright orange wall, and right at the edge of town, a cloud-capped volcano. Antigua was founded by the Spanish in the 1500s, and served as the colonial capital for almost 200 years, until a spate of earthquakes caused the government to move the capital to Guatemala City. Packed with Spanish Baroque buildings and ruins, it is a designated UNESCO World Heritage site.

“The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” — William Least Heat Moon

There was a Renaissance chapel I was heading to on this road, just down the hill from the village of Cortona. And then the sun, just before it sank beneath the horizon, ignited this leafy view of terraces and cypress trees and yellowy shrubs, and it gave me such pause that I never made it to the church.

Says Martin Buber, “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

I am always hoping to make a discovery here, to express the feelings of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their minglings and their oppositions, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones.

–Vincent van Gogh