It has been my custom for many years to collect books on art & photography, and on occasion prints, from artists who for one reason or another move me.  The practice has proven to be a source of inspiration, and provides case studies in style, lighting, and composition which in many cases finds its way into my own photography.  

One of the more illusive facets of photography is finding one's sense of style, "voice" if you will.  I think that is because style is somewhat intangible.  Learning the nuts and bolts of photography is one thing; that is technical know how.  But figuring out how to apply that knowledge and bring an image to life is an entirely different thing.  It's something that is part of one's soul and develops over time with practice and a lot of trial and error.  Studying works by other artists and discerning what it is about them that makes them work, or not, can certainly be of help in bringing one's muse to the surface.  So I pay attention to what others are doing and have done, and while I don't do that with the intent to reinvent their work it is inevitable that techniques rub off.

Photographers who immediately come to mind as influential in my work are Ansel Adams, Galen Rowell, William Neill, Alain Briot, Kennan Ward, Tony Sweet, and David Muench, to name just a few.  This is a widely divergent group of artists but all have something to teach.  Adams, of course, is the standard for many modern photographers.  His excellence of technique and artistry is without peer.  Who hasn't looked at his gorgeous black and white landscapes and marveled?  From rich blacks to bright whites, and every tone in between, his landscapes blossom better than if in full color.  And to think, he did that without aid of today's digital darkroom technology.  He, more than anyone I think, inspires landscape photographers to work in black and white and to perfect technique.  Galen Rowell was a master too of landscape photography while working mostly in color.  But he was also a noted mountaineer and writer.  His landscapes were marked by incredible lighting achieved by his uncanny tendency to be in the right place at the right time.  William Neill is noted for his "spiritual" landscapes of Yosemite.  Many of his images portray an almost impressionistic quality.  Alain Briot is not as widely known as either Adams or Rowell but had a huge impact on my thinking and approach to photography as art.  In one book authored by him he spoke of photography as if standing in front of his subject with palette and brush.  He discussed color as if a painter and perhaps for the first time I looked upon photography as a true art and my camera nothing more than a brush, and that it was my decision as an artist how to render the scene before me.  Ward is primarily a wildlife photographer with stunning photographs from Alaska; Muench, like his father before him, a stunning landscape photographer of the southwest.  Tony Sweet is to me the epitome of an artist with a camera.  He uses a wide variety of techniques to produce stunning images in the camera.    

All this being said, it is perhaps painters who have influenced me even more.  I am a great fan of the impressionists and often seek to render an impressionistic quality to my own work.  Georgia O'Keeffe's modernistic paintings of flowers and southwest landscapes inspired me greatly as I was photographing in New Mexico; and the wildly colorful abstract expressionist paintings of Joan Mitchell, John Paul Riopelle and Jackson Pollock inspired me to seek similar abstracts in nature, a few of which appear on this site.  But perhaps the most inspiring to me are the incredible landscapes, particularly western landscapes, of the Hudson River artists, specifically Thomas Moran, Frederic Church, Sanford Gifford, Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt.  They portrayed a country still being discovered and explored and perhaps best conveyed the spirit of the ideal, the vast untarnished splendor of the North American continent.  They brought the wilderness to the American audience and usually portrayed a lone viewer standing in a remote spot within the composition surveying the magnificence before him.  The standout quality of these images was the use of lighting to highlight the most important part of the scene and draw the viewer's eye to that being viewed by the onlooker in the composition.  And isn't that the essence of photography?  Perhaps it is this sense of discovery and awe that inspired Ansel Adams and today's artists to photograph and paint the little wilderness we have left, to at least preserve it in our minds.  Another trait of the "Hudson River" paintings is that they were not necessarily real in the sense that they accurately portrayed the scene painted.  Often they were approximations of the real thing; and while the locale could be easily identified they were figments of the imagination.  So, what is the difference if a photographer takes some artistic liberties on occasion?  It is not necessarily the photographer's intent to portray exactitude, rather it is to convey a feeling or an idea, and in that context I have reason to differ with those who insist photography must be true to the subject being photographed.  We are talking about art, not documentation.  

So, any work of art that inspires shows us a fresh approach to a particular subject.  It is a means of communication and a means to elevate the human soul to a higher plane.