My first laser science projects used helium-neon tubes, somewhere in the late 1980s or early 1990s. The attraction was simple: here was something I could build that made an idea from physics visible.

I grew up making things, so an interest usually became a project quickly. Later I moved to diode lasers and made personal builds from diodes salvaged from projectors. I liked understanding the parts well enough to make something of my own.

Photography gave the same fascination another outlet. A mineral surface can change completely with the angle of the light. A storm can rearrange a skyline. Whether the subject is a specimen, a competition assignment or a riding event, the camera is a way of working with light and making a picture out of it.

The festivals put cameras and lasers in the same scene. At Oak City Shredfest in May 2024, I photographed a person surrounded by blue and violet haze. You can make out a face and hands, but most of the picture is light filling the space around them.

A month later at Seek N' Shred, I photographed a wide fan of purple beams above the camp, with vans and tents giving the scene its scale. It's a long way from a racer coming at the camera in daylight, though both came from the same kind of weekend. An event keeps going after the last run, and the lights at night are part of what there is to photograph.

Through reliability work, I have had some professional experience with thermography. A thermal camera shows differences in heat your eyes can't see, which can help when you're trying to understand what a piece of equipment is doing.

The photograph here is from 2018: a handheld FLIR camera pointed at a ceiling, its colored image on the little screen. My thermography experience comes through reliability work; I am not a certified thermographer.