"It was a physically and emotionally challenging experience," he says.
Around the same time, he bought an iPhone, and a friend, raving about the phone's camera, challenged him to use it for serious photography.
After Hirsch posted two beautiful pictures of a tree in a cornfield near his Wisconsin home, his friend suggested he use the iPhone to take a photo a day of the tree for a year.
Hirsch rose to the technological and creative dare, shooting the tree from hundreds of angles in all conditions, calling it "challenging but also quite liberating."
His project, "That Tree," has been recently compiled into a book and a calendar. We asked Hirsch to share three weeks of images in chronological order with us, along with his own captions from each day. You can the whole year on his website and his Facebook page.