I set out in the cold this morning with my light carbon tri-pod, my pinhole lens in my camera, my ISO and aperture settings sky high.

One thing I love about pinhole photography is that it reduces picture taking to its simplest and purest element. A tiny pinhole of light on a digital mirror, no autofocus, no image stabilizer, not focus boxes to follow.

I can’t even see the image through the viewfinder, I just point it in the general direction of the subject and hit the shutter and let the light do the rest.

It will take awhile before I can come close to mastering this very simple but very complex way of taking a picture, so different that the methods i usually use.

I chose Maria’s Schoolhouse Studio because it is a symbol of our lives together, a shrine to our creativity. Maria and I fell in love with one another – it took  us a couple of years to figure that out – sometime around the time I offered her one of my barns in exchange for helping me with some sheep and donkey care.

It was the best deal of my life. When we moved from the first farm to this one, the first thing Maria put together was her studio, a bright, colorful creativity machine.

Her soul and heart are in that building, and so I feel it’s energy very strongly, it was the right choice for my first daylight pinhole photo.

I like the pinhole effect, it is simple, timeless, different. I was lucky today. The only input I have in this photo is to point the camera. This is how photography was born.