“We all spend our day somewhere in” that process, said Steve Uzzell, a photographer, speaker, author and business owner who spoke Tuesday in the latest installment of the Town Hall Lecture Series.

His talk “Open Roads Open Minds” explores how that process connects all humans. He threads that message with the photos he’s taken around the world, both as a photographer for National Geographic and later as a corporate photographer.

“The first ‘open’ is an adjective. The second ‘open’ is a verb,” he said. “An open road will open your mind. Nobody quite knows why, but anybody who has driven on an open road, your mind can’t help but wander. As it wanders, you will find solutions to things you had never ever, ever thought of.”

Uzzell was always fascinated with cameras as a kid — noting that like many boys, he saw a camera as a device to tinker with.

“The tactile, mechanical part to it is what drew me to it,” he said.

His father’s camera fascinated him the most, but as a young boy he wasn’t allowed anywhere near it.

“He thought I’d abuse it or lose it. When he was out of the country on business, I conspired with my mother to use it. And I just became completely hooked,” Uzzell said.

Throughout high school, Uzzell used this newfound love to take photos for the school newspaper and the yearbook. He even found paying gigs at the age of 13. He was hooked.

“I was a football player and a wrestler, and when the wrestling match was over, I would take a shower and jump back out and photograph the basketball (game),” he said. “I got paid to do that when I was in seventh grade — so I’ve been paid to take photographs for 63 years.”

After high school, Uzzell’s first stop was the U.S. Military Academy, where he spent the first three semesters of his postsecondary education.

“I left, I went home on a Thursday, and on Friday morning my mother asked me, ‘What are you going to do?’ And I said, ‘I want to be a National Geographic photographer,” he said.

A chance meeting with his high school principal that afternoon led to admission to the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Several years later he found himself fixing tech so a National Geographic photographer and Missouri alumnus — Wilbur Garrett, who later became managing editor at Nat Geo — could make a presentation to Uzzell and other students at the university.

“I didn’t know anything about the technology, but I’m a bird watcher, so pattern recognition is something I’m quite big on,” he said. “I went behind all these stacks of projectors, and the wires that went to the projectors were in a different order depending on the stack. I walked up to one of the technicians and said, ‘I don’t understand this, but I can say the left, center and right projectors, the wires that go to the projectors themselves are in a different order.’”

That simple observation led to his introduction to Garrett, and that connection later led to Uzzell taking a photographer position at the magazine.

Uzzell’s first assignment for National Geographic was to travel and document the life of people on the Inner Hebrides Islands on the western coast of Scotland.

An island assignment in 1973 was difficult, Uzzell said, but a perfect way to learn about all the aspects of travel a photographer needed to account for — hauling gear, finding a place to stay, etc.

“There were no such things as cellphones. A lot of the islands were so remote, there weren’t even phones in the inns I stayed in,” he said. “On one island in particular, there was a public phone in the corner of the general store.”

A phone call from a remote Scottish island in 1973 had to pass through multiple connections to reach the National Geographic offices in Washington, D.C.

“The sound level was just barely audible,” he said. “So you’re screaming into this telephone to try and hear the other person at the other end. And you turn around and all the townspeople on the island whose trust you’ve really tried to completely have come with you and they think, ‘my goodness, this is not such a gentle poet after all.’

“A friend of mine back in Washington gave me great advice. Hhe said, ‘Don’t call the office — don’t risk that again.'”

Tuesday was Uzzell’s 647th time giving the presentation, which he’s delivered in all 50 states.

“Many of them many, many times — Alaska only once,” he adds. “Also, I’ve given it in three provinces of Canada and five other countries, including China and India to a combined audience of close to 650,000 people.”

Twenty-seven years ago, it was a talk at a small camera club in northern Virginia — “where I was living at the time” — that led to his current business, a collaboration with several friends and colleagues he had met as a photographer for National Geographic.

“The gentleman who introduced me (at the talk in Virginia) came up to me afterward and said ‘you have the making of a wonderful corporate presentation,’” Uzzell recalled. “I said, ‘really?’ And he said, ‘really.’”

Uzzell said he called a colleague afterward who had suggested public speaking to Uzzell many years before.

“It just went right over my head” then, he said. “I didn’t hear him at all.”

That friend told him, “‘Well, you moron, what did you think I meant 25 years ago?’”

Uzzell set about creating a presentation that could connect his photographic work with motivation and a message about solving problems.

“It took me over a year to put the presentation together — to write the narrative and do the connective tissue,” he said. “And it’s taken me my whole life to shoot the photographs — so it’s not just something you put together over a weekend. But it’s great fun.”