Tim Macauley

The PCT changed
everything.

Most photographers talk about the golden hour. Tim talks about the hour before that — when you've been walking since 4am to position yourself at exactly the right angle, at exactly the right moment, because you've studied the light for weeks and you know what's coming.

That's what three completions of the Pacific Crest Trail teaches you. The PCT is 2,650 miles of continuous wilderness from Campo, California to the Canadian border at Manning Park, British Columbia. Tim has walked it 3 times, totaling over 9,000 miles on that single trail alone.

But the PCT is just home base. Tim's lens has followed him to the jungles of Cambodia and Indonesia, the ancient streets of Lisbon and Barcelona, the chaos of Saigon, the geometric perfection of Angkor Wat at first light, and the Shinto shrines and bamboo forests of Honshu. He shot Borobudur — the world's largest Buddhist monument — in the mist of a Javanese morning. He walked the wet Levadas of Madeira, ancient irrigation channels carved into cliffsides off the coast of Morocco. He's stood at the foot of Kirkjufell — Iceland's iconic Church Mountain — where the western plains dissolve into the North Atlantic. He got close enough to a Galápagos sea lion to see the whiskers.

South America has called him too — into the cloud forests and volcanic highlands of Ecuador, and deeper still into the Amazon rainforest. The Galápagos Islands, technically Ecuadorian but a world entirely their own, put him eye-to-eye with blue-footed boobies and iguanas that have never learned to fear a camera. India added yet another dimension — ancient temples, overwhelming color, sacred ritual, and a light that exists nowhere else on earth.

His photography philosophy is simple: the camera captures what you put yourself in front of. So put yourself in front of something worth seeing.