I wandered through the dark forest with a feeling of sadness and dread. Ancient spirits floated among the branches. I was lost. Unmoored.

I was lying prone on the sidewalk, squinting up through the viewfinder at the singer belting out a tune. She was into it, and so was I. I was just along for the ride, trying to hold the camera steady against my body that wanted to rock to the tune. Rolling around on the ground without a care in the world, barely conscious of the other people nearby enjoying the music. And all because of a playing-card-sized piece of plastic hanging around my neck.

We had driven past the bar a few times on our way elsewhere, and I couldn’t take it anymore. So the next time we drove past, I made everyone stop and wait while I jumped out to make a photograph. I worked the scene as best I could, mindful of the three cars in our caravan idling just up the road, eager to get to the next shooting destination. My photographs captured the emptiness I had felt out on the street, but something was missing. Or was it?

My computer was due for an upgrade. Lightroom was getting slow, and I was getting tired of watching the little thinking circle going round and round as the program tried to catch up to what I was doing. Photo editing and curation is often an intuitive process, and anything that gets in the way takes me out of the flow, making it difficult to continue with my work. So when I returned from a recent long road trip with 4,000+ images, I knew I couldn’t put off an upgrade any longer.

Sunrise comes early in the summer. Too early. The sun was already well above the horizon at 6 a.m., when my eyes fluttered open. I was in Prineville, Oregon, an hour west of the Painted Hills. I had never been there before, or even heard much about it. But a few weeks earlier I had spied it on a map, as my finger traced possible routes up to the Palouse. Which is how I found myself in an old ranch town in the Oregon high desert on day 3 of a 3-week road trip.

It was cold and foggy.  Just another mid-July morning on the Oregon Coast.  Everything was bathed in soft morning light.  A featureless expanse of sand spread before us as we made our way down a steep wooden staircase.  As our feet hit the sand, the magic began. 

I was down in Cabo for a wedding last week. I brought along a camera and more lenses than I needed – as I always do – but the kit just sat there, ignored in the hotel room. I would glance at it in the morning, then shrug my shoulders and head out for another day at the pool.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the manipulation of digital photos, sparked by the recent controversy over the whereabouts of the Princess of Wales. Why else would you manipulate a photo, other than to conceal the truth? But what interests me, more than the latest tale of Palace intrigue, is what do we mean by truth? We often think of truth as something that is objectively determinable, like the molecular weight of carbon. But some truths are subjective, and depend on your point of view. When it comes to photography, truth has always been a matter of perspective.