After graduating from college with a degree in Social and Rehabilitative Services I worked for corporate America in sales and marketing jobs for about eight years. I hesitated about college after graduating from high school because I was in a rock band at the time. All I wanted to do was play music. It just seemed like that was what I was meant to do. Even then, my soulprint was telling me that I had a need to "express". However, I still ended up in corporate America.

Shortly after we married, my wife Amy told me that I didn't seem to be happy in my job and that I should quit and do some serious soul searching as to what I would like to do for a living or more importantly, how I would like to live my life.

For some reason, and I don't really know why, I thought it would be nourishing to create photographic images and sell them. Why photographs, and of what, I really didn't know. I had no formal education or training but I felt that it was in me and so I set out to explore the world of photography and teach myself as best I could.

After decades of being a successful commercial and advertising photographer I was still searching for "more". More what, I didn't know. I just knew that there was "more".  

I began to discover what that "more" was when Amy sent me to New Zealand for my birthday. Alone. To reflect. For sixteen days. To reconnect. To rest and once again focus on what I wanted my life to be about or maybe I should say, discover what my life is about. It was there, while being alone, on the other side of the world, far from everything that I was familiar with that I experienced God Looking Back At Me.

The first several days I was shaking off the stress of the daily routines from home and documenting the trip with what I call vacation snapshots. You know, photographs of where I was and what I was seeing. Somewhere, about the fourth or fifth day, when I was truly realizing that I didn't have to "go anywhere" or "do anything", that I really could "just be", I began to "see" differently. The only responsibility I had on the other side of the world was to just breathe. So that's what I did. I would wake up and just breathe.

As the day grew into night and I experienced all of this overwhelming beauty around me I couldn't help but create images of what I was experiencing. It wasn't like the work of creating commercial and advertising images that I had been doing for all of those years. It wasn't work at all. It was just breathing.

Then it came to me. Whether I was shooting a tiny grain of sand or a vast mountain range, I was experiencing God's creation on both sides of the lens. I was looking at God Looking Back At Me. I could see things perhaps in a way that others couldn't see and that it was up to me to show them. My ability to do this is a gift and if I can help someone feel, when looking at one of my images, the way I feel while creating it, the circle will be complete.

When these "1/60th of a second" moments happen for me, I calm myself, release the shutter to let the light in through the lens, and just breathe. I would like for you to do the same when viewing one of my images. Perhaps you too will feel that sensation of "God Looking Back At You".

Become conscious of the intensity of being present.