Flying on commercial aircraft is an ordeal, but an ordeal tempered by opportunities. I'm usually over by the little porthole of a window, looking, day or night, enjoying the speed of the plane near the ground, and its growing apparent stillness as it climbs to cruise in the thin air.

I began working on this body of aerial photography in 2000, flying from San Diego to various conferences. I shot the first dozens of rolls of film in black in white, experimenting, but recently the work has shifted to color, and it's work I'm finally happy with. The distorting optics of plastic airliner windows, combined with the incessant vibrations of the aircraft almost always guarantee images lacking fine definition. No problem. These works are about motion, about going, about boarding a plane in California on a warm California evening and walking off five hours later into a snowstorm cloaking an East Coast dawn.