Pete always wanted to be a photographer, and he studied the craft at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He also studied art, and was influenced by the work of René Magritte and Yves Tanguy, two twentieth-century artists who were part of the Surrealist group in Europe.

Throughout his career, color has been a constant. "Color is what attracts me to a scene," he says, "but there has to be more than color—there has to be content. But content is often hard to find when you're working with highly graphic colors and bold design, so you tend to rely on color. Some photographers will tell you, if you're in trouble, go for color; meaning if you can't find content, let the color carry the load. But once you get to a certain level, you get back into content."

Color, he adds, can be hard to control. "It can lead you down a lot of tricky paths, and it can mess up compositions because your eye will be drawn to the color area like a magnet, and that's not necessarily good for the composition." And so he will often reject scenes that don't work as compositions, even though the color may be brilliant. "Sometimes I get closer and closer to getting the picture. Then, I stop and realize the composition is falling apart."

When the picture is working, Pete knows when the work is done. "I know a lot of photographers have problems knowing when they've done enough on a subject or a scene, but I have a good feeling for that. I do know when I've got it, and whatever roll or disk I'm on, that's it. I don't look back or think I should have taken more pictures. I have confidence in my ability and the equipment, and I walk on to the next picture. I guess you could say I know when I've satisfied my own curiosity."

"There is a difference between the digital palette and the film palette," he says of his digital images. "Digital gives me a more subtle, more pastel, less saturated image, which is interesting in its own way. And then, of course, I can play all sorts of games with the image in Photoshop."

Pete calls Photoshop "the darkroom of today," and he uses it as a retouching tool—and to control color in his images. "I'll work with color levels and curves, hue and saturation," he says, but not with filters or composite effects. "I don't do any photo composition," he says, partly because he doesn't like the look of it, and also because, he says, it's too easy and too many people are doing it. "I don't like to follow the path of what's trendy."

When we spoke, he was a week away from a trip to Spain. He has a few things in mind to shoot—some parks, some architecture—but he knows he'll end up being surprised. "That's what I live for," he says, "the surprises. I have objectives, of course, but on the way to those places or afterwards....well, that's why I like to keep traveling. It's energizing to see new things."

You know, he's going to do it again.

Pete Turner has been an NPS member since 1977.