Corinna Stoeffl explores her the beauty of her backyard

I was raining when I visited Corinna Stoeffl. The road was already slick with mud and I wondered if I would get out, or would a flash flood trap me there. The weather showed me how her Abiquiu home is the perfect place for a landscape and wildlife photographer to live. I wanted to pull over to capture the way the stormy clouds made the red rocks look different from every angle. I wasn't the only one. Greedy photographers walked along the highway, hoping to catch a glimpse from an angle that no one else has seen, or for the clouds to highlight the curves in a new way.

Most of Corinna's photos are taken in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado, but she first got serious about taking pictures in the summer of 2004 when she had a chance to go to South Africa. She bought a good camera and made it her goal to take some pictures for herself that she could be proud of.

As it turned out, she took some great pictures, and began to sell her photographs in art fairs the following summer. Photography became her main focus. She joined a mentorship program at the Santa Fe Photographer's Workshop "I didn't want, ten years from now, to look back and wish that I had done something."

She looked out at the threatening weather and said, "Later on I may just get in the car and just shoot."

She usually shoots two or three times a week. There's a big difference between how she approaches her work when she's traveling and when she's at home. When she travels, she looks for things that catch her eye, but there is a sense that it's now or never.

But when she's at home she goes to the same places, over and over again to explore the changes. The creek behind her house is one of her favorite places. She likes to capture how the rocky bed of the creek will become murky when there is a flash flood. She said, when you go to familiar places, "you get to know it and keep discovering new things."

She has a deep connection with nature. In an interview in the Rio Grande Sun, she said, "I tend to see details in nature that are interesting to me and often have difficulty in capturing them to my liking." It is in her visits to familiar places that she can experiment with things to try to make it work, and see what she can change.

One of the hardest lessons that she has learned is: "Never leave home without your camera!"

Every Sunday Corinna sells her work at the Community Fair at the Farmers Market in Santa Fe. She will participate in the 2009 Abiquiu Studio Tour, October 10-12, and she will have a solo show in the Fuller Lodge Portal Gallery March 26th through May 2010.