Success means different things, at different times.

Disappointed they did NOT have an Ansel Adams stamp...

Taken in 2009-ish. I know.. It was a nice
thought though!

Before I finally quit my 9-5, and long before I made a living as a photographer, I knew I wanted to be one. I had no idea my path would lead me to where it has - something I am truly grateful for, and still have no idea where I may end up.

When I was working a "regular job", I barely had time, or the the money (and never both at the same time) to REALLY travel. I did what everyone else does, and dreamed of destinations through photos I saw. I always told myself, and my wife, we would go there someday. In my mind, I knew we probably wouldn't, but it's nice to dream and hope. Fast forward to when I was getting close to quitting the corporate world for a life of freelancing - lofty goals and high expectations, that were quickly shot down by the reality of working harder than I had ever worked before, and learning what "Hustle" truly meant. I still dreamed, I still aspired. Without goals, work is pointless.

I remember reading about Ansel Adams and how he came to be a household name, what his photographs meant, etc.. I had always liked landscape photography, although even early on I knew a career taking only landscape photos was probably not a realistic occurrence for most people. I mean even if it was to sell a few prints here and there for pocket cash, that was fine by me. Sometime in the early 2000's I literally told myself I wanted to be "there", when I saw the picture of Ansel on top of his station wagon in a random book or literature. "There", as in "I made it", was just as much a state of mind, as it was standing on my truck in an iconic location to shoot some amazing photo, just like Ansel Adams did.

As things, and life, go, I went a different way. I still remember that conversation I had with myself, what I EXPECTED out of that goal at that moment, like it was yesterday. What I did NOT know at the time, was that success is not always what we thought, or wanted it would be.

Fast forward to April 2018 - more than a decade later. I walked into the Ansel Adams gallery at Yosemite Natl. Park, bought this post card and jotted on the back an obligatory "here", so as to not mail a completely blank postcard. I mailed it to myself from the Yosemite Park Post office next door to the gallery, which had an added bonus of a Half Dome postmark stamp too. When I came home, and retrieved this postcard out of the mail it dawned on me. I DID make it. I DID succeed. I actually teared up, because I realized what had REALLY happened with my life, and the long hard road of sacrifices my family has made to get me here too.

I've sold several landscape prints in the last few years, that I had taken on my travels that photography paid for. I walked the same path at Yosemite that Ansel did many years before, because of money I earned from MY PHOTOGRAPHY.  In the last 4 years I have taken my family to nearly every state in the lower 48 (many of them multiple times), driven coast to coast, and to 3 countries. In 2015 we drove enough miles to circle the equator, plus throw in a trip to the North Pole from Dallas. I made it before I even realized it, but it took Ansel Adams himself (in a weird name dropping way!) to make me realize it.

Texas Architectural Photographer

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