I’ve been chasing light my whole life.
I just didn’t always know that’s what I was doing.
Forty years. One through line.
My name is Michael Steighner. For four decades I designed light… for stages, concerts, corporate events, and productions of every scale. I ran Hy-Lite Productions out of South Florida, built a career on a simple premise: light doesn’t just illuminate a moment, it defines it. The angle. The temperature. The timing. Get those right and something ordinary becomes something people remember.
I understood this in a technical sense long before I understood it in a personal one.
Then 2020 arrived and the world stopped. Overnight, the events industry went silent… gatherings of every size canceled, venues dark, phones quiet. The gear cases sat untouched. The load-ins disappeared from the calendar. The long drives home stopped because there was nowhere to drive home from.
In that stillness, something unexpected happened. I started asking a question I’d never had the space to ask before. Not what do I do next, but what do I actually want to make? For the first time in a long time, I had enough quiet to hear the answer.
I wanted to slow down. Point the camera at something that wasn’t going anywhere. Find the light in places that had been waiting for it long before I showed up.
The year everything changed.
When the world started opening back up, I drove to all 50 states. Not a sprint, but a slow, deliberate wander. I shot video along the way. I talked to strangers. I stayed in places I’d never heard of and photographed light I’d never seen.
Something cracked open on that trip. Not dramatically. More like a window that had been painted shut for years finally giving way. I came back different. More certain about some things. More willing to be uncertain about others.
I’d also gotten sober. I don’t make a lot of noise about that, but it’s part of the story… because clarity changes what you notice. It changes what you’re willing to say out loud. The work I’m doing now, the honesty in these posts, the willingness to write about reinvention without flinching… all of that is connected.
The 50 at 60 project is documented on YouTube. The deeper story lives here.
What I’m actually doing out here.
So for this next act, I’m working my way through all 63 U.S. National Parks. One at a time. In person, with a camera, paying attention to the light.
Most photography guides tell you where to stand. I want to tell you when… and why the light at 6:47 a.m. on the east rim of the Grand Canyon does something to your chest that no photograph has ever quite captured, and what you have to do to be there for it.
That’s the lighting professional in me. Forty years of knowing that the difference between a moment people remember and one they forget is usually just a matter of timing and angle. The national parks have light worth understanding. I’m writing the guides I wish I’d had.
In between parks, I write Field Notes. Less structured pieces about the road, about creativity, about what it looks like to start over at 61 with a camera and a cat named Penny and no particular deadline.
Those essays are the ones that seem to find the people who need them.
A few things worth knowing.
I travel slowly. I prefer one good conversation to ten forgettable ones. I photograph in the early morning and the late afternoon because that’s when the light is honest. I travel when I can with my cat Penny, who is a better road companion than most people I’ve met.
I’m 61. I live in South Florida and spend as much time as I can somewhere else. I believe the second half of life is where things get interesting, if you’re paying attention.
I built this site because I couldn’t find what I was looking for anywhere else… a place that took the combination of light, travel, photography, and late-life reinvention seriously. Not as a hobby. Not as a hustle. As a way of seeing.
So I built it myself.
Walk alongside.
If any of this sounds like something you’ve been thinking about… the parks, the light, the question of what comes next… the best way to follow along is the email list.
I send occasional notes. Not a newsletter in the traditional sense. More like a dispatch. A photograph, a reflection, a park I just wrote about, something I’m still working out. Occasional. Personal. Never noise.
Occasional emails. No noise. Always personal.
The best light happens when you show up.
— Michael