I have a card with a quote on it from Abraham Maslow. When I first read it, I felt it embodied the essence of my photography. “The great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbor’s, friends, and family, in one’s back yard.” Nothing could be more true.

After graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute in photography, I thought as a landscape photographer I needed to move somewhere with “exciting” places to photograph. So my wife and I packed our stuff and moved to Colorado. It took less than a year to realize I found more personal fulfillment photographing the landscape between the mountains and my childhood home in Warrensburg, Mo., than I got from photographing the obvious beauty of the mountains. Each time we drove home to visit family, I created more photographs and fell more in love with the simplicity of the Kansas landscape. We moved to Kansas nine months later.

I’ve been in Kansas more than five years now and haven’t run out of things to photograph. In fact, I have barely left Douglas County to photograph for the past two years.

The photographs selected on this page represent the diverse landscape in Douglas County. The more I photograph this small slice of Kansas, the more intimate and beautiful it becomes.

— To purchase or view more of Edward Robison’s photography, go to his Web site at www.edwardcrobisoniii.com or the Robison-Feiden Galleries at www.thekonzapress.com.