You Found This Place for a Reason.
A quick orientation before you start exploring.
Most people who land here found a photograph, a national park post, or something about light that made them stop scrolling. Then they started clicking around and wondering… who is this guy, and what exactly is this place?
This page is the answer to that question.
What Chasing Light & Story Is
I’m Michael Steighner – a photographer, filmmaker, and the founder of Hy-Lite Productions, a full-service lighting design and production company I built over more than forty years in South Florida. I understood, in a very literal and technical sense, how light transforms a moment… designing it for concerts, corporate shows, fashion events, and weddings. How the angle changes everything. How timing is everything.
Then something shifted. I stepped away from the stage and started pointing my camera at something different… back roads, national parks, small towns, and strangers with stories worth telling.
Chasing Light & Story is where I document that evolution. Part photography journal, part travel guide, part field study in what it looks like to stay curious and creative when the runway feels shorter. If you’re navigating your own version of that transition, you’ll feel it here.
What You’ll Find Here
Depending on what brought you here, one of these might be the right first door:
The National Parks
I’m working through all 63 U.S. National Parks one post at a time, chasing the light that defines each one. As a lighting professional turned landscape photographer, I look at these places differently than most guides do. It’s not just about where to stand. It’s about when the light does something you can’t plan for, and how to be ready when it does.
Field Notes
These are the less structured pieces. Reflections from the road, thoughts on creativity and aging, and essays about what I’m noticing as this second act unfolds. Less guide, more journal. If you’re in your own version of this transition, these might feel familiar.
50 at 60
The project that started all of this … visiting all 50 states in the year I turned 60. One man, one camera, every state. Not the tourist version. The honest version. The videos live on YouTube. The stories live here.
Park Guides
I’m building a growing library of detailed photography field guides for each of the 63 national parks … focused on light, timing, composition, and what a photographer actually needs to know. These are coming soon. Get on the list below and I’ll let you know when they’re ready.
Voices
Some of the best stories aren’t mine to tell, they belong to other people. Voices is where I share the stories of others: interviews, conversations, and the occasional documentary project. Which brings me to something worth telling you about.
Where the Hunger for Other People’s Stories Began
Before the national parks project, before Chasing Light & Story, there was Kim Kahana.
My friend and collaborator Frank and I had already worked together on a short independent film “The Country House” when we decided to tackle something larger. What started as a documentary idea grew into a full-length film about one of Hollywood’s most prolific and largely unsung figures: Kim Kahana, a legendary stuntman whose 72-year career quietly transformed stunt safety and the art of stunt performance in movies and television.
I was the cinematographer, director of photography, editor, music supervisor, and narrator. Too many hats — but the project demanded it. Kim was 92 years old when we made it. He was sharp, generous, and fully present for every scene.
He got to see the finished film, shedding a couple of tears at the directors cut screening. He watched it make its way through film festivals. And a few months after we wrapped, he passed away.
Kim Kahana: The Man Who Changed Hollywood is now available on Amazon Prime. I’m proud of it in a way that’s hard to put into words. Not because of the production, but because his story, a story that deserved to be told, now exists permanently.
That experience is what opened the door to Voices. Once you’ve sat across from someone at 92 and helped them tell the story of their life, you start looking at every person differently.
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Walk Alongside
If you like what you’re finding here, 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 from wherever I am in the journey. A photograph. A reflection. A park I just wrote about. Something I’m still working out.
Occasional emails. No noise. Always personal.
Glad you found this place!
Michael