When you see an image, its meaning is to a large extent determined by your personal experience. When I make an image, I attempt to capture what I was experiencing at that moment. And the two are never quite the same.

One of the reasons for this gap is that my experience at the moment I make an image encompasses not only the visual elements I work with to create a composition, but the smells and sounds, the temperature, humidity, wind and other sensory stimuli. As for this particular image, all the time I was working on the composition there was the delightful "laughter" of a canyon wren echoing through the canyon. If you've never heard this unique, amusing song, you owe it to yourself to seek it out. While it's impossible to capture such a sound in a photograph, it is possible for it to influence the character of an image. Here, I felt that the roundness of the rock forms, the repetitiveness of the rocks and shrubs, and the "loopy" quality of the shapes in the background all harmonized with the song of the wren. I feel there's a certain humor in this image -- if you agree, you can credit the wren for it!