HL: The dreamlike landscapes I see in your photos are so otherworldly, it’s hard to believe they come straight out of your camera, and are not created in post-production. I know you like to keep the specifics of your process under wraps, but in general, how do you do it?

TL: The process involves composing reflections of the 360 degree landscape surrounding me and using filters to shift colors. Each image is a single exposure; all of the layering and color-shifting happens optically. I like to think of these images as in-camera collages. This means that the subject for most landscape photographers – the mountains in view – becomes raw material from which I construct images that are new vistas altogether. The images are not a document of where the camera was pointed. Shifting colors completely unmoors the image from actuality. Why does ambiguity have to be relegated to dreams? Being able to work with color independently from subject gives me much more control over the emotional tenor of the images. Changing color changes everything.

My work is a marriage of calculation and spontaneity. I have a toolkit and I have a sense of what might happen, but at the same time, it’s a surprise. It’s almost like popping a periscope up from a submarine, only once I pan past one view I can never pan back to see the same thing; it will have shifted to something new by then. What actually happens is the product of a playful moment. I know the conditions that make good Psychscapes, but I never know exactly what image I’ll see when I put my eye to the viewfinder.

Since the images are made on-location, it’s as much about the experience as it is about the photograph. There’s an altered state of mind that comes from leaving the city behind, and that’s definitely part of it. The fact that I don’t know what I’m going to get keeps me excited. There are so many natural factors beyond my control during a session – the cloud cover, the angle of the sun, the precipitation in the air – and all of these things affect what I’m able to produce. Not only do I not know what the image is ahead of time, but even as I’m doing it, it’s fleeting. If I don’t take the picture the moment the magic happens, I lose it and can’t remake it.