This series began during a period of solitary travel around the country. When Ella, my dog and only companion, finally grew fed up with being my sole subject, being told to "Sit!" and "Stay!" for endless photos one time too many, I embraced something else that had caught my eye: the fascinating patterns of human presence within these special places. Normally we go to great lengths to try and keep other people out of our shots, trying to create the illusion of perfect solitude, but what if instead I embraced the presence of others, turning it from bug to feature. Shot from a distance in which people are still recognizably human but the emphasis becomes collective patterns rather than individual differences, these images became playful reminders of some of my favorite things about humanity: our curiosity and pursuit of beauty, adventure, and awe. The original title for this series was Ants in Paradise.

In an era when human differences often dominate our attention, these photographs offer a gentle reminder of our common nature—our shared smallness against natural grandeur and our persistent willingness to be awed by it nonetheless. There is something deeply hopeful in watching how reliably we seek out these experiences, how similar our behaviors become when encountering the sublime. Viewed from afar, our varied quests for connection with these landscapes reveal an unspoken consensus about what matters—small figures navigating the edges of something much greater than ourselves.