When we wanted to talk with one of Utah's most famous nature photographer, guess where he was? Not hiking through some canyon in Grand County but driving east to capture the fall colors.
"I can't really make a living just shooting in Utah," said Tom Till, who lives in Moab and is celebrated for his stunning landscape photography of views throughout the southern part of the state and in northern Arizona."I have to shoot the whole country, and then I do a fair amount of foreign work, too."
Till, who stopped along I-80 to return the paper's telephone call, was on his way to check out autumnal tints in Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and maybe a couple of other states.
That kind of drive is what has made Till a success in the competitive world of nature photography at age 44. He is constantly in the field, lugging his 4-by-5 Toyo field camera, film packs and hiking gear.
Several times a year he hosts workshops on outdoor photography, trying to keep up with the demand for his teaching expertise. He has produced several spectacular photo books, including "Utah: Magnificent Wilderness," which has a forward by Wallace Stegner.
A viewer should take time when studying one of Till's photo books. Don't leaf swiftly through it.
A double-spread of Indian rice grass in raking sunlight in Dinosaur National Monument; the gleam of dawn on the Bonneville Salt Flats (which Till says is the easiest place on earth to take interesting photos); the misty Book Cliffs rising above a stretch of new snow; a powerful arm of red sandstone rising in front of a purple vista of canyons and pinnacles - if you flip through photo after photo, your eye is assaulted with all this concentrated beauty.
"I'm always looking for really striking light - that's probably the first thing I'm after," he said on the phone, with the dim sounds of passing cars in the background.
"I've always done the same thing, which is nature and landscape. That's my big interest. I kind of self-assign everything. I do some assignment work, but I'm usually just kind of following things that I really like to do."
Till often goes shooting in the mornings and evenings when the sun is most dramatic. But in the last few years, he began to "try to stretch that a little bit," he said.
So many of the views in the book "Utah: Magnificent Wilderness" depict landscape in the moodiness of dawn or sunset that "I thought maybe this is a bit of a cliche," he said.
Photographers find it more difficult, and more challenging, to take fascinating photos in the middle of the day. But that's what he has begun to do, adding to his repertory.
Till lives in Moab with his wife Marcy and their son Bryce, 5, and daughter Mikenna, 10. They could live anywhere in the country, but Utah is the place that seduced him from the first time he visited the state as a child.
When he saw Elliott Porter's nature photos while in college in Iowa, he knew he had to move to Utah and work here. He visited the state on and off, then moved to Moab permanently in 1975, where he worked hard at photography.
Ten years later, he was able to quit his job as a school teacher and devote himself full-time to art. Marcy Till also taught school until a couple of years ago and helps her husband's expanding business.
The color transparencies - huge slides - that Till shoots on this trip will be developed and filed. When clients call for shots of particular scenes and places, he is able to go through his files and supply them.
"Most of our business is done through our own office in Moab, which is our house," he said. "We have a number of agents that we're with, too."
Till said using transparencies instead of negative film means he is not at the mercy of the photo labs' printing machines. "When people have prints made, the machine kind of dictates the color," he said.
Transparencies, if developed correctly, give much more consistent results.
Another reason for the use of transparencies is that publishers always use slides when they scan in the pictures. So for his pictures to be published, if he used print film, slides would have to be made from the negatives anyway, which would degrade their quality.
Even though he loves southern Utah and northern Arizona, Till manages to find natural beauty wherever he goes, even in urbanized areas. One large book he produced a few years ago is about New Jersey, which has some surprisingly beautiful areas.