I wanted to give this image a sense of perspective and depth by unifying three distinct horizontal layers into a cohesive landscape. With this objective in mind, I built the base layer around three rounded masses of cholla cactus. I arranged these shapes horizontally, in order to rhythmically repeat the rounded masses of golden mountain stone in the background. My middle layer features a field of saguaro cactus that flows horizontally across the entire frame. The vertical thrust of each saguaro repeats rhythmically throughout the middle layer, and the saguaros also mimic the vertical slashes of mountain rock appearing in the background layer. This background layer paints the entire top portion of the frame with the reddish gold colors of sunset, contrasting boldly to the field of green vegetation spreading before it.

A layered image is most effective when the elements in the different layers echo each other. Such is the case in this image – it begins with a small buoy at the bottom edge of the image, which is the brightest spot in the photo. It is small but striking, drawing the eye to its vertical shape. It points directly to the forest of sail boats anchored just behind it. The boats are darker than the buoy, yet the tips of their masts catch the day’s first light, and replicate the buoy’s verticality. The masts in turn lead to the prime layer – the city itself, and its cluster of golden 19th century buildings. These towers echo the sailboat masts, while the 38-story Agbar Tower, resembling a huge vertical pickle, incongruously dominates the image. The final layers of this cityscape carry the eye into the fog-shrouded hills in the background, and then to a clear morning sky.

Today’s Goldfield is a recreation of the actual gold mining town that stood near the beginning of the Apache Trail, in Arizona’s Superstition Mountains. The original town thrived from 1893 to 1898, and when the gold ran out, the desert took over. It rose again in 1921, when new mining methods brought forth additional gold. Eventually the ore finally ran out in 1926, and the town was left to decay for another 60 years. About twenty-five years ago, a commercial recreation was built as a tourist attraction on the ruins of the vanished town. Today, it is filled with individual shops, occupying authentic copies of the old buildings. We arrived an hour before sunset, just as the shops were closing. We virtually had the town to ourselves -- an old Western stage set bathed in warm evening light.

I’ve used layering to gradually build a sense of place in this image. I include alternating layers of light and shadow on the dirt road that lead us through the picture, and towards the town church at the rear. I silhouette a spiral staircase and a “bird cage” jail on the left, a layer that leans in the direction of the church. I include a saguaro on the right edge as a framing device, leading the eye towards the middle layer – an old barn, glowing in the setting sun. A pbase photo colleague from Malaysia, Celia Lim, was also working the scene, and I waited for her to move past the barn and walk below the huge tree that adds bulk to the middle layer. Celia becomes a layer unto herself, a silhouette urging us to follow her towards the final layer – the church itself.

Nature’s geologic upheaval provides its own layering here, and I use it to layer my view of the massive bluffs along the Colorado River that define the borders of Arches National Park. There are three layers that give a sense of depth perception to this image. The prime layer fills most of the frame – a striking jumble of slabs piled upon each other by the movement of glaciers long before there was a place called Utah. The distant bluffs tower above them, adding the brightest layer of color to the image. Textured clouds provide the final layer, capping the image.

While in Austin, we took a sunset cruise along Lady Bird Lake, passing below the numerous bridges that tie the halves of Austin together. I was able to fill my frame here with four simultaneous layers of content: abstracted pedestrians walk across the bridge on the top, while a car moves across another bridge in the middle, a boat slides along a shimmering band of golden reflection at the bottom, and the setting sun itself, joined by backlit clouds, fills the background.

I build this Grand Canyon evening vista around four successive content layers. The foreground layer features the massive, rock-strewn bluff protruding into the canyon on my right. It provides dimensionality – depth perspective – to the scene. The middle layer is a transitional layer – shadowy buttes on the canyon floor, linking the foreground to the subject layer itself: the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, gilded by a very brief appearance of the setting sun through the evening overcast and haze. The fourth and final layer is the background layer -- the rolling hills that top the North Rim, and the evening sky, streaked with clouds, just overhead.

Each of four layers I meld together in this image advances my story. I use the pile of manure on the bottom to give the image its odiferous base and symbolize the realities that accompany housing dozens of cattle within a single building. The second layer is a bed of straw that seems to sanitize the manure piled beneath it and at the same time offers an incongruous stage to a rooster visiting three large friends. The third layer features a bovine trio that ignores the rooster and gazes directly at the viewer instead. The fourth and final layer consists of the steel bars that keep everyone in place.

I use five layers to give depth perspective and scale to this sweeping vista of one of Yosemite’s most famous sights. By shooting from Stoneman Meadow in the early evening, I am able to contrast the heavily shadowed layers of trees to brightly illuminated layers. A large tree hangs into my frame at left and provides a strong foreground layer. It pulls the eye of the viewer into the image and partially frames the Half Dome, its branches acting as a pointing device. The silhouetted forest on the other side of the meadow offers a second layer – adding a bottom edge to the frame I started earlier with the tree. The hawk, so small in the evening sky, has a layer all to itself. It flies between and above both the forest and the monolith, adding scale and a focal point to the entire scene. It is the also the soaring hawk that gives this picture its freshness and energy. Half Dome itself, made famous in the Yosemite photographs of Ansel Adams and others, is the fourth layer – the most vividly colored and the largest subject in terms of scale. It gives the image its identity and sense of place. The fifth and final layer is the cloud-streaked sky, which creates a delicate, wispy, yet vividly colored background for everything else in the image

A group of crows devour scraps of food in the foreground layer while a group of Indians relax in the middle ground layer and two fishing boats work in the background layer. When we put the three layers together, we compress the incongruities of an Indian beach scene into an expressive beach scene.

The combined deep sea and river ports of Shanghai became the world's busiest port for cargo tonnage in 2005. These ships ply the Huangpu River, which leads to the Yangtze River. I use only three ships in this image to suggest the continual traffic flow on the river. My long 420mm telephoto flattens the distance between them – they appear about to collide. There are three different kinds of ships and four layers of information in this image – the small ship in the foreground contrasts to the freighter bearing down on it in the second layer, while a ferry boat brings up the rear in the third layer. The fourth and final layer offers a backdrop of Shanghai office buildings in the morning mist.

Over 50,000 people came to this baseball stadium on July 4th, 2007 to see their home team, the Colorado Rockies, rout the visiting New York Mets 17-7, and also enjoy the traditional Independence Day fireworks display. Photographing explosions in the might sky is never an easy task – particularly with cameras that have a bit of shutter lag. I had to make dozens of images to get just one evocative pattern of sky bursts. I used the “multiple exposure” control on my small wideangle pocket camera to make this shot – I held the shutter-release down as the rocket was fired and the camera continued to make exposures at the rate of twice each second. There are several explosions visible in this single image. They are transparently layered within each other, giving the viewer a vivid impression of the beauty and energy of a fireworks display. The only thing missing is the concussive sound of the multiple explosions – but this picture can readily stir the mind to imagine them. The stadium scoreboard at lower left is topped with the logo of the home team – the Colorado Rockies. It offered me specific context for this image, as well as a stable target for spot-metering my exposure and focusing.

A simple image made up of only two layers can be just as expressive as a multi-layered image. My background layer is a stained glass window, featuring a colorful western scene. It is one of several in the lobby of this building, once Arizona’s tallest. Built in 1928, the Westward Ho was one of Phoenix’s first luxury hotels. It shut down in 1979, and now is used as subsidized housing for disabled and senior citizens. The candelabra lamp in my foreground layer has bulbs glowing in only five of its seven sockets, a symbol of the wear and tear that time has brought to this once glorious structure. Yet the vividly colored scene behind it still evokes a moment of the history that once brought tourists to this hotel. Together, the juxtaposed layers tell the story of both the Old West and a famed hotel that has gracefully faded away.

This 27 mile winding dirt road begins near the Rhyolite ghost town, and winds into the National Park through the Grapevine Mountains. This remarkable view is from its windswept crest at Red Pass. It later drops down into a rock-lined gorge. I made this image in the spirit of the romantic Hudson River School paintings of the late 19th century. Using a camera with a 28mm wideangle lens, I anchored these mountains on a layer of red earth. Our road twists and turns below us across the middle of the anchor layer, turning away from us and then vanishing into the center of the image where the second layer begins – a series of rolling mountains that recede in scale as they move from right to left. The final layer is a rich cloudscape extending across the entire image. The colors in this image are as rich and varied as any I have ever made.

Nature gave me four of the five layers in this image, and ten passionate nature photographers gave me the fifth. Every day, ten to twenty photographers carry their tripods up to the top of Death Valley’s most visited overlook at Zabriskie Point to await the coming of the light. On this winter morning, an icy wind chilled the rocky surfaces, but these photographers never flinched. They not only were about to make their own pictures, but they helped me make mine as well. I use the large curved dome of smooth rock as my foreground layer – including the long diagonal path rubbed smooth by generations of serious landscape photographers. The gently curving arc of ten photographers in various stages of preparation and wearing contrasting colors create my second layer – they are my subjects and the view from Zabriskie Point is the context. The third layer is a pair of pink ridges; the fourth layer offers a mass of merged ridges that carry the eye to the valley of the Amargosa Mountains. The final layer is the valley itself, reaching out to the foothills at the very top of the image.

The 230 foot high minaret is the highest structure in Morocco's third largest city. Built in the 12th Century, this minaret served as the model for the famous Giralda in Seville. I abstract the tower in two ways: by cropping the top and bottom to only show part of it, and by layering a tree over the tower, which not only abstracts it, but also adds a symbol of life and vitality to an otherwise inert subject. Half the visible tower is in shadow as well, which adds a three-dimensional illusion to the image.

Four layers deep, this image attempts to express a moment in time when three different seasons are simultaneously in play. The green foreground suggests summer, while the dark rocks offer a transition to fall, which bursts into color just above them in the middleground. The entire background is made up of snow-covered hills -- terrain already in winter’s grip. Each layer flows across the image in diagonal movement.

This structure, a virtual homage to the memory of US Route 66, is literally covered with symbols and numbers saluting its location on the “Mother Road.” In the hey-day of Route 66 it served as a motel, and is now part of a complex of crumbling buildings surrounding a popular Seligman drive-in. I compose this image as series of layers, starting with the fender and bed of a rusting pick up truck in the right foreground. (Naturally, it’s full of tumbleweed.) There is a bike somewhere in that truck as well. The diagonal thrust of the truck bed leads us the second layer – another bike, followed by a third layer detailing the amazingly decorated façade of the building itself. It is covered with tires, hubcaps, and discs spelling out the name of the historic road. As throw-ins, there are two huge “66’s” and a Coca Cola sign on the wall as well, which glows and bulges in the warmth of the summer sun. A final layer is tucked away within the windows and doors – no space is left unadorned with tributes.

Florence is known for its 1936 bridge carrying Route 101 across the Siuslaw River. I photographed it at dusk, using a wideangle lens turned vertically to stress the huge pilings as my foreground layer, and worked the horizontal bridge in as my middle ground layer. The final layer is the soaring cloudscape, which once again returns to a vertical orientation. I call this a layer sandwich, alternating between vertical and horizontal thrusts. Even though the subject may be a still-life, these alternating layers create a set of tensions and counter tensions that energize the scene.

One goat. Many tether poles. It is an incongruous situation, made coherent by the use of layers. A foreground layer holds a tether pole. It serves as an entry point into the image. It draws us to the one holding the lonely goat – the primary subject layer in this image. A sea of tether poles and piles of hay comprise the next layer, while the buildings of the farm, one of them build in traditional style, makes up the final layer. A twisting path of straw carries us from layer to layer, each one adding incongruous scale context to the sole goat.

Modeled after the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, the CKS Memorial features an enormous seated statue of the Chinese Nationalist leader. I used the statue as a softly focused background layer. The foreground layer is my primary layer. It features a wreath left in his honor. I moved in for a close up of its ribbons and delicate flowers, leaving only a small space for the background layer to show through.

The power lines provide a stage, the setting sun a backdrop, and the freight train is the principal player in this Barstow scene. Each offers a layer of meaning, which, when superimposed upon each other, combines subject and context into a coherent presentation.

While cruising through Kotor Bay, we passed a small shipyard, where freighters were being repaired and refurbished. I used my telephoto lens at its full 432mm length to abstract the hull of a distant ship, forming a three-layer image. The foreground layer is a shimmering reflection, which leads the eye to the ship. The middle ground layer is the dock at right, with its extending ladder at upper right and an array of colored ropes, each of them used for a specific repair function. The background layer holds the hull of the massive ship itself – its surface resembling a painter’s palette, with reflected light dancing gently along its keel, its name in bold lettering, and the shadows of the ropes and ladders attached to it adding their voices to the chorus. The variations in the play of light helps make this layered image function as expression.

I saw these works of art stacked almost randomly at the back of a Santa Fe art gallery, a perfect example of layers in itself. An art dealer is attracting visitors not by displaying individual works of art, but simply by presenting a variety of Western art in abundance. These layers were already in place when I saw them through a window from well outside the gallery. I only had to recognize their significance and make the most coherent image I can of the scene. I was drawn to the incongruous juxtapositions created by each layer, as well as the contrasts and linkages of scale, color and shadow. The wrought iron sculpture of the horse in the foreground layer anchors the composition in darkness, a darkness that also explodes in the feathers of the final background layer. There are two middle layers between them – a portrait of an angel on a contrasting white background, and a painting of a group of Native Americans layered between them at lower right. Each layer offers a different flavor of coloration, scale, and subject. I chose a camera position to compose these layers along a diagonal line, linking the horse’s tail, the wing of the angel, the painted face of the Indian, and the feather that flows out of the picture at upper right. Four different artists have created works that an art dealer has placed together. I have isolated them as four layers within the boundaries of my frame to express the nature of this gallery here in the quintessential city of the old American West.

It is possible to layer images from side to side, as well as from front to back. In this case, I use three layers, moving from left to right, to express my idea. These ornate wooden horses were staring at passersby from an antique window in Santa Fe. They not only were protected by a pane of glass, but also by a wire mesh insert. By shooting the window from an angle, I was able to illuminate the mesh on the left hand side to create the first layer – giving the horse on the left a caged presence. This single caged horse contrasts to the matched pair of horses in the right hand layer, who do not seem to be contained as securely. The wooden panel running down the center of the image is a layer unto itself, symbolizing division. Looking at all three layers together we see these horses as unequal partners, locked away in a microcosmic stable of life.

Graffiti is, in itself, a layer of meaning superimposed on something else. I use horizontally progressive layers in this image to portray the transformation of an abandoned freight train into a work of contemporary art. This image reads from right to left – beginning with a layer focusing on a partially painted caboose, then moving to a middle layer of an unpainted portion of that caboose, and then culminating the most expressive layer at left – a fully painted freight car, featuring an energetic stick figure that seems to be dancing in a swirl of arrows and circles. To me, these progressive layers symbolize the fading of the railroad era -- a 19th century transportation medium with its grimly painted steel siding, forever transformed into a 21st century form of urban story telling.

I arranged the three layers of this image along a diagonal axis, starting with the unformed blossom in the lower right corner, representing a life yet to be experienced. A second layer evolves directly above it, as a plant explodes into a brilliantly colored double bloom. Its green stems also sprout several shadowy blossoms to come, as well as fly the tattered banners of blossoms past. These Lilliums, which grow in the courtyard of the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts, symbolize the life cycle in itself – yet the image adds still another level of meaning as it moves to the third layer – a softly focused chili ristra (a bunch of dried red peppers). The ristra, a decorative icon of the American Southwest, is partially in shadow, hanging in the darkness, and providing contrast to the flowers in scale, color, texture, and meaning. These peppers were once alive, yet acquire their purpose in death. If not shellacked, they can still be used to bring fire to the palate, and ultimately offer a symbol of hospitality to all who shall pass under its shadow.

A bizarrely incongruous (and perhaps unintentionally offensive) chair inviting us to sit in the lap of Native American, also acts as a door stop for an art gallery. I use the chair as a subject layer, and play it against the context layer of the gallery’s dark interior, replete with Indian rugs, wall hangings, and even a headdress. The image questions how we perceive art itself – in this case, is it expression or commercial caricature, or both?

Between 1821 and 1880, the Santa Fe Trail connected Missouri with New Mexico, carrying covered wagons, stagecoaches, gold seekers, trappers and emigrants across the heart of the Old West. It was put out of business with the coming of the railroad to Santa Fe in 1880. Yet thousands still trace the trail as a historical experience, and this is what they pass as they enter the last few hundred yards of its route as it winds its way into the heart of Santa Fe: art galleries selling romanticized sculptures of Native Americans. I made this image in the early morning, using this sculpture as my foreground subject layer. But the reason I made this picture was the middleground context layer – the seven diagonal shadows cast by the protruding roof beams of a gallery building. They rhythmically carry the eye across the frame to the sculpture, and I use them as metaphorical drumbeats that accompany the buffalo skull hunting ritual being performed by this figure. A third layer comprises the background, a tree incongruously rising between two stucco walls. It is a symbol of the natural world, a refreshing counterpoint to the man made forms that otherwise fill this image.

I was struck by the incongruity of this mural – a surrealistic halo-wrapped Virgin Mary rising from a barren desert amidst a pile of enormous flowers. And then I saw the barred window cut into the sky of the mural. Meanwhile, that is real earth at the base of the mural, supporting a bush, incongruously growing in front of the painting. One might wonder which came first, the bush or the painting? This foreground layer provides the only reality in the image, yet it miraculously merges into the mural – the middleground subject layer -- as if it was a vision created by the Virgin Mary herself. The barred window, along with the curved sliver of sky overhead, reveals the entire mural as painted on the wall of a building, which in turn creates a background layer. It is fascinating – we can look at the building as either a structure or as a mural. In this image, these middleground and background layers can change roles, depending upon how you choose to look at them.

On summer weekends, Santa’s Fe’s central plaza is filled with Native American artists selling hand-made jewelry to crowds of tourists. I stationed myself on one corner of the plaza and watched as the artisans arrived to set up their wares. I saw this woman coming at me from a distance. She had to cross two streets to get to her selling location, and was slowly dragging a wheeled cart behind her, carrying her chair and jewelry. My telephoto lens compresses distance, allowing me to stack three distinct layers within this image. The foreground context layer is filled with a pedestrian walkway leading across the frame, while the middleground subject layer features another walk way leading toward us, along with the artisan herself, head lowered to watch each step as she makes her way in our direction. The background layer offers additional context – it is the corner of the La Fonda Hotel, a Santa Fe landmark. The early morning sun defines its distinctive architecture and coloration, and its shadowed side allows the artist plodding towards us to stand out in striking contrast. It is a demanding task for this elderly woman, and it takes every bit of her strength to make this journey to market.