The Marine was in his mid-20s when he entered the photo lab at the Wounded Warrior Battalion West onboard Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in San Diego County.

“I have to sit in a corner so I can have eyes on the room at all times,” he said, staring intently at me.

“The room is filled with your brother Marines,” I said.

“I don’t care who they are, I trust nobody,” he told me as he dragged a chair into the far corner of the lab.

After he almost quit the class and then had some major emotional setbacks, the Marine began making surprisingly brilliant photographs. “When I’m taking pictures, I feel no pain anymore,” he told me.

f-Stop Warrior Project was launched with the support of the Tug McGraw Foundation in Yountville to teach digital photography to wounded Marines suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

The magic was that studying photography helped warriors returning from multiple combat deployments focus on something outside themselves, something beyond their anxiety and fear, something positive and healing. Many of these Marines found themselves unable to express their feelings in words. Yet when I gave them a camera (thank you, Canon USA) and taught them the basics of photography, they created amazing images that subliminally spoke about their current emotional state. They began to feel heard, understood. They began to heal.

The f-Stop Warrior Project required our students to create their images off-base, part of helping them move back into the civilian world. As their images improved, they began to view that “other world” as a less hostile, alien place.

Leaving the Marines and transitioning back into the civilian world is often a daunting, difficult and long process, especially for those suffering from PTSD. Digital photography allowed these wounded warriors to be good at something immediately and provided them an important, even life-saving, new way to communicate, as well as a new skill and confidence. Some of them even turned it into a livelihood following further study, like my reluctant student who sat in the corner.

The work of my warriors was very good. Having looked at photos, text messages, movies and books through a frame since childhood, they came to my class with a strong sense of the compositional elements of a good photograph.

Camp Pendleton, which is home to 42,000 young men and women in camouflage uniforms, proved intimidating to a socialist, pacifist, draft-dodging, leftover hippie like myself. Until January 2013, the closest I’d ever come to our military was trying to place flowers down the gun barrels of the Army soldiers when I joined Abbie Hoffman’s attempt to levitate the Pentagon in 1967.

At first the Gunnery Sergeant staff reveled in giving me endless amounts of grief about my long hair and clothes. A retired Marine told me this was a good sign (“If they didn’t like you, they wouldn’t even be talking to you.”) Encouraged, I began giving it back to them. When they called me a “hippie” and made insinuations about my “manliness,” I called them “a bunch of sissy little schoolgirls.” They loved it.

Using humor during class brought us closer. I got hugs from the warriors (“keep it brief and don’t move your hips”) and was frequently called “brother,” another sign f-Stop was working. There was an immense amount of love and caring for the wounded and injured at the Battalion. It’s why I was there.

My students were often in pain, physically and spiritually. They didn’t talk about their injuries much; they’d simply tell me if they were having a good or bad day. Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) was a constant for many of these warriors. PTSD has been described as the warrior’s shadow. It’s always there, all the time; it follows you day and night. There’s no relief from it. One of the tasks our wounded warriors had was to learn to live with their “shadows.”

For three years, the f-Stop Warrior Project supported the recovery of wounded warriors, significantly reduced their PTSD symptoms, and eased their transition to civilian life.

Working with America’s wounded warriors changed my life. After all, any teacher, if they are any good, learns in equal parts from their students. The Marines taught me the true meaning of honor, courage and commitment. Hopefully, I helped them heal their wounded bodies and souls as they began to explore the world through a new magical lens — the lens of digital photography.

“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.”