What is your favorite type of art to create?

Fine art landscape photography in the Oregon Cascades — capturing the quality of light that exists for maybe thirty seconds before it's gone forever. I also do astrophotography: night skies above the High Cascades where the Milky Way looks close enough to touch. Both disciplines demand patience, presence, and a willingness to stand in the cold for a long time waiting for something extraordinary to happen.

Where do you find inspiration?

In the Cascades, mostly — ridge lines at dawn, river bends in storm light, the hour before a weather system rolls in. I was diagnosed with ASD and ADHD at 65, which explained a lifetime of hyperfocus and pattern recognition. The landscapes that most people walk through, I tend to stand in for hours. The mountains reward that kind of attention. So does the night sky. I find inspiration wherever the ordinary becomes briefly, unmistakably extraordinary — and I try to catch it before it disappears.

What would you do with $25,000?

Half toward expanding my fine art photography — equipment, archival printing, and my first public exhibition. Half toward Oakridge Concerts in the Park, a free community concert series I run as president of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in rural Oregon. Art doesn't belong only to people with gallery access. In a small timber town, a free concert or a landscape print on the wall can be the thing that reminds someone the world is bigger than their hardest day.