Books & Publications

SHAPE THE PROJECT moves through the creative offices of Nike, Apple, Bose, Samsung, and Williams Sonoma, across 84 empty Jira epics, meetings that generate obligations without closure, and 7,700 podcast notes, and keeps arriving at the same dividing line: ending things is available to anyone; closing them is a skill.

I am not a certified project manager, an AI researcher, or a guru. I am a photographer, contractor, and corporate survivor who kept the receipts. This is not a project-management manual, an AI prompt guide, or a corporate tell-all. It is a witness statement and a practice: shape the work before the work begins, fix the time and vary the scope, give the work an owner, and close one loop before opening another.

From the corona and shadow crossing Oregon, to Comet NEOWISE over the John Day River, to Jupiter and Saturn closing to a thumb’s width in December 2020, to Mars going backward in the sky and the Perseids burning up over a campout, this is stargazing as it actually happens: cold, patient, occasionally ruined by clouds or wildfire smoke, and worth every hour of it.

The book braids three things: the observing itself through binoculars, small Dobsonian telescopes, and cameras; the ancient sky of Babylonian scribes, Egyptian Sirius tracking, and Mayan Venus tables; and the 2026–2040 astronomical almanac covering upcoming solar eclipse paths, asteroid Apophis in 2029, and the Leonid meteor outburst of 2033.

It will not teach you the Zone System. It will teach you what it feels like to stand in front of El Capitan with one frame left and the light going, or to open the back of the camera in a heated tent at Curry Village and find fifteen frames you worked for crunched into overlapping ghosts.

The chapters follow the gear and the ground: the Nikon FG-20 and the 100-day road trip, Ektar 100, the one-hour photo counter at Kmart, the N80 and its AA battery lie, the F4 dying at Brookings, Toketee Falls, the last frame in the Alabama Hills, nine miles into Ice Lake with yellow eyes in the dark, shooting weddings on a 5D Mark III to pay for film, and an archive of 120,000 images. The delay is the practice.

So I followed it: through Micah’s eleven hundred shekels and the house of gods in Ephraim, the Levite whose heart was glad, six hundred Danites carrying a stolen shrine north to quiet Laish, and on to Revelation 13, where the image of the beast is given a voice. The objects Rachel sat on are the same species as the object blinking on the desk. The idols talk like my computer does, and the Bible saw that coming.

Checked against Rashi, Ibn Ezra, the Nuzi tablets, van der Toorn, and ancient versions, alongside transcripts of how conversational AI actually works. Fourteen chapters with a verse index, claim ledger, plain-language glossary, and sourced timeline.

Three human-like, seven four-legged, among them a horned figure with four arms and a rider on horseback. Nobody knows who made them. Nobody knows when. Some researchers think the oldest marks could belong to the first people in this hemisphere, the people of the Paisley Caves fourteen thousand years ago. That gap between official dates and possible dates is what this book is about.

Across four years I camped near the pass, photographed it in snow with a 360-degree camera, documented the figures in flat measurable light, walked the Abert Rim shorelines, and stood in Fort Rock Cave. Picture Rock Pass is a record of looking closely at what it means to stand in front of something older than the idea of standing in front of things.