“Beyond the munDane” is the outgrowth of teaching photography in high school. Students always ask, “what good is this for me.” I started out building an online photography portfolio as a demo. Then they wanted to know, “what else can you do?” So, after doing some online research I decided building a travel blog. Then it took on a life of its own. Next students wanted to know, “okay, cool, what else?” So now I am working on learning how to monetize; now “Money” got their interest.

As a photographer I tend to see the world, not at eye level, but from angles and perspectives that most people don’t see in their normal day to day. My photographic journey started over fifty years ago in the US desert Southwest. Now retired, I travel to find “the pic”. I always told my students, “if you want to get ‘the pic’ you have to go where ‘the pic’ is. So now off I go for awesome adventures and “Beyond munDane” pics.

I grew up in the southwest in the 60’s and 70’s and still, as an artist/photographer, I am drawn to this region like none other in North America.  I have lived in tents and small camp trailers, on reservations, oil fields, on mountains, and in deserts.  I’ve explored the forests and dunes, canyons and caves, and even into long deserted turquoise mines.  As a child I played with snakes and lizards, and found creative uses for cacti as an instrument to harass my younger brother.  Like children often do, we imagined we were standing on the very mountain top that Spanish Conquistador explorers once stood as they surveyed the vast wilderness below. As an adolescent I climbed rock formations and even skinny dipped in cold mountain streams.  Horseback riding trails and fence lines long into the cold night was a favored activity and escaping the light dome of town, I traded it for the clear bright starry desert sky.

Later in life as an Art teacher in the southern midwestern plains states, I always referred back to my southwestern roots for inspiration.  In addition to the usual drawing and painting lessons, I taught pottery, weaving, macramé, and construction of Ojoes; a uniquely southwestern artform.  Unfortunately, my midwestern students did not develop the same appreciation of southwestern art as I had.  However, it was in a junior high school art class in Albuquerque where I first fell in love with photography.

I am soon to be a retired photography teacher and the purpose of this travel blog is to chronical my photographic rediscovery of the US desert southwest. Furthermore, I will share other stories, past, present, and future, of other adventures to faraway places such as Uganda, New Zealand, Costa Rica, and Scotland among many others.