DeSmet waits for Tour Toddler T-Shirt

Welcome to my ever-expanding collection of landscape, wild-life, and other artistic images. Inspired by the rugged, windswept coastlines and the majestic redwood forests of the northcoast of California, I have been drawn to landscape photography, which allows me to explore the rich colors and forms of nature and attempt to draw from the particular scene the essential mystery and transcendent beauty that may exist in its outward lineaments. The senses are poets, as the philosopher George Santayana averred, and in dealing with color, shape, form, texture we transform these symbols from practical signs of material objects to essences that can be contemplated for their own sakes, free from the animal cares embedded in worldly things....