I love the outdoors. As a child, I spent every possible moment exploring rural Arkansas; that's where I grew up, by the way. Rather than obsessing about television or video games, I could always find more enjoyable activities outdoors. In fact, I recall playing entire football and baseball games alone in my backyard. I even won a World Series MVP or two by the age of ten.

As I grew up, and we moved out of the country and into town, I lost a little connection with nature. A drivers license and my first job took me even further away. When I graduated from high school and went on to college, I found some new friends that helped me re-kindle an old love of Mother Nature. With many camping trips to "Big Hole" and countless float trips down the Buffalo River, I knew I had found my way back home.

I have always stayed busy as an adult, and I never seem to get outdoors as much as I would like, but wandering around in the woods is, without question, the one place where I would always "rather be." My travels have taken me to 19 states so far, though not all of them since I developed an interest in photography. That happened about six years ago, around the same time that I met my wife, Cindy.

Cindy and I met in Fayetteville, AR, and moved to Little Rock when we got married. She started medical school, and I started working too much, again. But I found time to get out and shoot when I could, and she and I made a few trips to the Smoky Mountains and two trips to New Mexico and Colorado. We recently moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where she is doing a residency in Psychiatry. As for me, one short stint at a job that I didn't like very much, and I decided start my own business. I established Nextours, a Virtual Tour photography and design company in February of 2008, and I look forward to working with a camera every day. More importantly, I look forward to making my own schedule. So when the rains come, I can go hunting waterfalls.

As an artist who loves the outdoors, I am often saddened by the negative impact we humans have had on this beautiful and precious resource we call home. In all of our searching, with all of our technologies, we have never found another planet that could sustain us as a species. Yet we continue to strip the Earth of its resources at an alarming rate, all the while trying to dream up futuristic ideas that will perpetuate our existence once the Earth's resources are gone. As I see it, we have one chance, learn to live in harmony with the Earth. It is a hard concept to imagine, since we can't even seem to live in harmony with each other. But we have the technologies to live cleaner, to rely less on what the Earth has so needlessly given and rely more on the resources that are renewable, like wind and solar energy. But the wealthy continue to make policy, and the politicians and lobbyists continue to hide behind legislation that merely scratches the surface of change. We need real, deep, lasting change if we want to continue to exist on this glorious planet. Otherwise, the Earth might just rid itself of us, if we don't do it to ourselves first. And sadly, it might be better off.

Only through our efforts will the beauty of this world be preserved for future generations.