Now semiretired, he still does some commercial work. But he has also put together a book that combines his love of photography with his love of nature — and with one other love, poetry. "Visual Verse" (Synergy Books, $29.95) combines some of his favorite photos with some of his favorite poems — ones he's written himself and others that he's long admired, such as William Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Lord Alfred Tennyson, William Shakespeare, Robert Service, Joyce Kilmer and others. The book is available in bookstores as well as on his Web site at www.visualverse.com.

"Poetry's something that I've always enjoyed. I could sit here and recite two hours' worth of poems that I memorized while I was traveling in my car in the insurance business."

He sees poetry as a perfect compliment to nature, which he considers "God's art." He was taking a picture of a simple pine tree in front of a mountain peak when he thought about "how so much of nature leads our hearts, our minds, our eye upward. I realized what a natural gift we possess. The idea for a poem came into my mind, and I wrote it down. That was kind of the impetus for the book; that was the first pairing. I wanted to find a way to share this wonder with others."

Then, he says, "I discovered a fancy word, symbiosis, and I realized that's exactly what was going on." Poetry and pictures can enhance each other, support each other, make each stronger than they are alone.

He is, of course, not the first photographer to discover the wonders of the Colorado Plateau. Western landscape photography grew out of the government survey teams that went out to document the West in the 1860s and '70s. Photographers often went along — with pounds and pounds of chemicals and fragile glass plates — to document the journeys.

They were followed by countless others who sought, and found, inspiration in the rugged Western landscape.

So what does Parkinson look for when he goes in search of pictures? "I look for the absence of someone else's tripod," he jokes. "This region has been photographed and photographed," he continues more seriously, "so I try to find a unique perspective. Sometimes that's the light, sometimes the angle."

And sometimes it's serendipity — being in the right place at the right time. "But I like what they say about success — that's when luck makes opportunity."

Many times, he says, he's had a preconceived notion of what he was looking for, only to get sidetracked by something else. For example, "one time I was going to takes pictures of a grand ocean landscape, with crashing waves and sweeping vistas. My eye was caught by a little pile of pebbles. And I thought that the grand landscape was really made up of these little rocks, just like humanity is made up of an accumulation of individual people."