For years I struggled to photograph the large bodies of water in my life. Lakes and oceans have always been my refuge and my solace, and they never fail to attract my lens. However, time and time again I failed to capture the water; my photos were much too busy, seeing everything while capturing nothing.

Now, I distill the water into its simplest form, making abstract what is too big to capture conventionally. By panning the camera while holding down its shutter, I create blurred abstracts of the water’s most distinctive qualities: color and texture. I strip away the busy imperfections, the out-of-place waves and clouds and flotsam. After the pan, only the essence of the subject is left.

Old Horizons makes the bold case for photography as a manifestation not of what the camera sees but what we see. Rather than capture water objectively, my images capture water as we humans see and feel it. I aim to distill the essence of that rich and varied vastness; by veiling its dizzying busyness, I unveil the water.

old horizons.

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from left: Cirrus Tracks I, Blue I, Afterglow I

After several years of practice, I had mastered the simple horizontal pan. I made hundreds of abstracts, and they were all the same. The water was blue, the sky a pinkish white. I needed to break away, to capture some other facet of the lake.

left: Magenta I, above: Stratus Dance IV, right: Ripple III

below: Ripple II, right: Daybreak IV

I began to arrive at the water earlier in the morning and stay later in the evening. I strove less for techincal perfection and more for understanding, for intimacy with that gloaming vastness. My style evolved, focused, sharpened. I drew closer to the essence of the lake.

left: Rainshadow V, above: Rainshadow I, right: Stormlight III

above: Stormlight II, right: Ember Water III

I realised very quickly that if I only went down to the water on traditionally beautiful days my photographs would all be essentially the same. I weathered heavy rains, blizzards, and thunderstorms on the beach, and found a certain serenity on the far edge of those extremes.

from left: Fire III, VI, II, I, V

Walking along an empty stretch of coastline one day, I collapsed into a catharsis, a vacant peace of sorts hewn from the hundreds of days I had spent at the lapping edge of this great expanse. I was preoccupied and distraught: for a month I had created no good photographs, and I wondered if I was done, if I had made what could be made and had nothing left to give my camera.

left to right: Copper Sky III, Gloaming I, Gloaming III, Sunken II

I sat in the sand and watched blue ripples reach around my boots and looked at the horizon I knew was there behind the morning's thick mist and realised that no, I was not spent, for when I looked out across that blue I still felt. I was focusing on precision, on taking crisp and perfect pictures, when all I needed to do was photograph the feeling of my toes in the water, of wind in my ribs and smallness against the sky. And that is what I did.