I keep coming back to this place - trying to figure out what makes it look so amazing. It strikes something inside of me... that beauty can be found hidden in back roads and small places you'd never expect. I found this spot one saturday morning on a dusty road, and became mesmerized by the location. I've taken over 100 pictures at this spot with four different cameras - but this one picture captures everything best. I almost don't want to return for fear that it might be different - that the owners might change the land, build a new fence, hack down some trees... who knows? Things change so quickly, but this picture will always be one of my favorites and remind me of saturday mornings with my camera, trying to learn what makes a good photograph.  

DOUBTING - Sometimes it's easy to doubt what you can do. I do it all the time, even though I don't voice it very much. Can I be a photographer? No - I tell myself not to try too hard, or send photos off to magazines, or put 100% into seeing if things can work. Yet every event I've gone to, every time I packed my gear, checked my batteries, and really tried to be a "photographer" - I've come back with images that capture the event. I can do this... 

Mornings like this one are inspiring. A Saturday morning in the country - driving around looking for beauty to photograph. It was so calm on this morning as I got out of my car and walked around this abandoned farm. It was such a silent morning, the mist just clearing from the horizon. I walked around the land and imagined an entire family living there, loving, laughing, dreaming, and eventually leaving.  

The Forgotten. 2005

My wife is the very definition of beauty.
She creates art with words. With pictures. With paint and color.
She always tells me how lucky she is... but I'm the lucky one...
to meet her at Barnes and Noble Bookstore at a job I didn't even need.
Without her my life would be void of her vivid color and beauty that permeates everything she touches.

My wonderful wife is an artist. She doesn't believe it sometimes, and sometimes doubts herself... but how can you doubt the beauty and joy in her work? This bench was created to benefit a children's museum in Omaha - to be auctioned off to rich people for the museum. There were three benches created, and my wife's just happened to not garner as much money as the other benches (there were three total). She's disappointed, and it's easy to understand why; her bench was easily the most amazing artistic piece in the entire room.

She finds reasons to doubt herself sometimes, but she shouldn't. You can't apply dollar signs to something like this, because that's not the point. The point was to make people smile - to make children smile - and if a room full of rich people are were too drunk or too stuck up to remember what it's like to be a kid, to have "ice cream dreams," then screw 'em.

The success of this bench can't be measured in dollars. It will be measured in the thousands of children who stop by the bench to read its inspirational words and view its brilliant colors - and who smile because of it. In years it will be worn, its color faded by thousands of gentle small hands, but it will have done more good in the world than any of the people at the event could ever imagine.

Casey - you bring smiles to everyone who views your art, and I can't imagine a more powerful and important thing than that. You make me have more hope in the world. I love you.

We live in fragments of time, in a reality in which time passes so quickly, it's almost impossible to grab hold of what we are experiencing. Even thousands of photographs over a lifetime amount to mere minutes... in the end, memory is all we have.