For the past few months I've been suffering from the hunger pains of needing to grow and expand my photography. That's been causing me to do some deep soul searching, trying to get in touch with my "Inner Photographer" who's trying to get out.

One of the good things of this hunger is that I'm finding and identifying what it is I want to do and, most importantly, what I don't want to do photographically. The times I try something different, explore a new style or type of photography and it falls flat emotionally and photographically, it means I have listened to my inner creative soul. I have listened to the gentle voice of God directing me away from concepts and I'm just not into. So, I know what I don't want to do. This past week I watched a very famous commercial photographer's video taped during a shoot with a musician. I never heard of the musician before, but the images that came from that studio session made tears well-up in my eyes. The images were gripping, emotional and exactly the type of pictures I want to make.

I continue to thumb through the pages of "The Farmer In All Of Us, An American Portrait" coffee table book at least a few times a week. It's a book based photographs commissioned for the Ram Trucks Super Bowl XLVII commercial. The 2-minute TV spot that stopped everyone in their tracks to hear the words of the late Paul Harvey's classic "So God Made A Farmer" and the photography of 10 top shooters. When I study these photos of ranchers and farmers contained in those pages my spirit soars. The images are gripping, emotional and exactly the type of pictures I want to make.

I'm starting to feel a new drive in my soul that I can't say I've felt before, or at least in a long time. It's a direction I want to go... no, make that, must ...go towards.

Over my 53 years of holding a camera (allowing for about 6 years of my life when my parents didn't let me at their Kodak Pony II 35mm film camera) has been a long-term growth to get to the place I am today. I've had hundreds and hundreds of pictures published during my newspaper photographer days, and Lord knows how many times my right index finger depressed a shutter button to capture. How many of those images, that after the film was souped, never saw the light of day outside of a quick viewing with the 3x loupe at the light table.

In the past, I wanted to be just like my photography heroes. I wished my photos would look as cool, have as much drama and emotion and be tack-sharp to boot like theirs. And I guess, to an extent, I still want to be like the photo big guns. With age comes wisdom? Maybe. With age comes more of an urgency to get my act together and start making some powerful pictures.

I just read another photographer's blog which said, in a nutshell. "Your photos are going to look the same today as they did when you were snapping pictures in high school if you don't put "YOU" in your images." And he's right. How can a photographer have his own style and connect to the art he is making if it's not truly his art? If I'm always trying to make my pictures look like somebody else, they're not my pictures, they are a crappy copy of the famous photographer's work.

I am feeling confident in where I must go with my photography. All the photographic images I have bubbling around in my creative mind need to come out and be birthed. I've wondered why and how a California born and raised guy like me ended up in a small farming community in southern Minnesota. And the move here happened smack-dab in the middle of, but not because of, my "mid-life crisis." I think I now know why. I need to be here and bring to life this vision I have for capturing the people and land of this Midwest region. The farmers, ranchers, truckers, welders, mechanics, laborers, common man. The dirt under the fingernail, sweat ring around the seed company ball cap kind of American worker in this place he and she calls home.

I've set the wheels in motion to get these pictures to show my vision of this place. I will be doing a lot of self- assignment work during 2015. I feel good about this knowing that as I develop a body of work, more work (i.e. - paying gigs) will come about. One of my current photographer heroes, a highly regarded and highly paid shooter, does about 50 self-assignments per year on top of his extremely busy paying photo job schedule.

One of my dreams now turned into a self-assignment is to document as many of the rural, prairie churches as I can. I'd like to do a book with the all the photos I make at the end of the project. I made the first step toward that goal this past weekend. As always, the first frames were crap and I was very frustrated, but by later in the day, I pushed past that negative mental roadblocks, uncooperative clouds and haze and made a few good pictures. More are to come. I have a couple other long-term projects that I am trying to jump start as well at the same time. More to come on these projects as the pictures get made!