Fifteen years ago, I was in a used bookstore in Maine and stumbled onto a beat-up, paperback copy of Rachel Carson’s The Sense of Wonder. It had been out of print for years. Rachel Carson is the patron saint of the modern environmental movement. Her book, Silent Spring, is on many top-ten most important books of the 20th century lists. But on her deathbed, she said that this series of short essays she wrote to inspire adults to share their love of nature with children was the most important thing she ever did. She was talking about saving the….

My friends, Gerald and Brenda, were getting married and I brought my camera. I always bring my camera to weddings. Here’s why: I know too many people who have hired too many wedding photographers and not been happy with the most important photograph of the day. Somehow, unbelievably, they got married without someone taking a photograph of the bride and groom that the bride and groom love. Trust me, it happens. That’s why I bring my camera. Before I go to the wedding of friends, I call the bride and groom and ask them if they can give me a….

  I haven’t had much luck as a photographer returning to a situation to improve on my first attempt. Something’s always different. It’s either the wind or the clouds or the light or somebody put a scaffolding up since I was last there or whatever. Something’s always different. You need to make photographic hay when the sun shines, because neither the hay or the sunshine may be there tomorrow; believe me, I’ve gone back many times to find them both gone. You need to treat every opportunity like it’s your last opportunity. It’s sound advice, trust me. Certainly, convincing yourself….

    I remember checking into this hotel right around noon which was a little odd to begin with. Check-in was almost always an evening event. It was a first-floor room that didn’t smell quite right; this was not the Four Seasons. My car was just on the other side of the window. I recall a drastic temperature shift as I walked into the hyper-air-conditioned room after just minutes before being baked in raw one-hundred degrees sunlight. I think it was Texas. I’m not sure how long it took me to notice that the far corners of the room were….

When Ansell Adams was standing at the top of a mountain pass releasing the shutter on his 8 by 10 view camera, standing next to the donkey who had carried the camera’s required case of glass plates and 50 pound tripod, he was thinking about what he was going to do when he got back to the darkroom. His exposures were based on his understanding of how emulsions behaved in developer and his medium was silver.

When I was twenty years old, I decided I wanted to be a war photographer. I had this romantic notion that I could change the world with my camera. I surveyed the wars happening around the planet and concluded that Northern Ireland was a logical place to begin—they spoke English. I wrote a letter to every newspaper in Northern Ireland offering my services for free. Remarkably, the photo editor of the Belfast Telegraph, the country’s largest newspaper, thought it seemed like a good idea—he wanted some fresh, enthusiastic blood on his staff and I was both. I was extremely naïve,….

I like this picture because it’s funny. A man in a suit is perched high in a tree. Body language and facial expression suggest that he could do mischief at any moment. I would later find out that he could. But I love this picture because this man became a dear, life-long friend. And this picture beautifully, I think, captures his personality. I took it the day we met. I had been assigned by the Philadelphia Inquirer to photograph a series of prominent Philadelphians and the trees they loved. This is Dr. Bill Klein. He was the Director of the….

Somewhere in Delaware a woman came out of an apartment building and headed toward the beach. She said hello; we were the only two people within eyesight—it would have been awkward if she hadn’t—and we both proceeded on our missions. She was going to be alone with the beach; I was going to be alone with my camera.

Isn’t it a gift to help people we care about with our cameras? The idea of scrounging up a good photograph for a dating service sounded so deplorable to me that I actually fell to my knees and thanked God I was married—and that was shortly after a seriously minor disagreement with my wife. It was really gratifying to eliminate what could have been a deplorable cultural ritual from a wonderful and, hopefully you, Mr. Right, will think, beautiful woman’s life.

It’s amazing how your senses change when you do get out of a car. All of a sudden everything is more real. I can remember appreciating how blessed I was to have been given the gift of photography. It was a meditative spiritual moment to be sure; I can remember hearing the snow fall. New York City has many redeeming qualities, but you cannot hear snow fall in mid-town Manhattan. In Upstate New York—if you get out of the car and you’re lucky—you can hear snow fall.

Sometimes you just need to drop all pretense of studied technique or artistry. Just push the button. If you feel a funny little reaction in your brain to something just push the button. There are great photographers who have developed their photographic radar to a fine honed art by doing just this.