Henry Diltz’s famed career as a rock photographer was a bit of an accident — a happy one, to be sure.

Diltz started as a musician, a co-founder of the Modern Folk Quartet. The group’s primary lasting recorded legacy was “This Could Be The Night,” a Phil Spector-produced track with a psychedelic Beach Boys vibe from 1966 that was never officially released as Spector began to withdraw from the music business.

The group broke up shortly thereafter, but while all the members went on to other roles in music, it’s Diltz’s career as a photographer that most stands out. As a member of MFQ, Diltz found himself in L.A. hanging out in the ’60s Laurel Canyon scene. He befriended everyone from the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz to Mama Cass; Crosby, Stills & Nash; Joni Mitchell and others.

While on tour, the members of MFQ bought cameras to alleviate road boredom. For Diltz, it would have a gravitational pull. Soon, he was taking naturalistic photos of his Laurel Canyon friends. The photographer-next-door vibe of Diltz’s pictures resonated with the artists who keyed into a feel that matched the authenticity of their music better than canned publicity shots.

It wasn’t long before Diltz’s unstaged photos were gracing album covers for the Doors’ Morrison Hotel, CSN’s debut and James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James. He teamed with artist and designer Gary Burden to create hundreds of now iconic album covers.

In 1969, Diltz was hired as the official photographer for the Woodstock and Monterey Pop festivals. But like so much of how rock and roll business was done at the time, for the former, “hired” equaled Woodstock lighting designer Chip Monck calling Diltz and saying “Henry, we’re gonna have a big show. You should come down.”

Whether it’s Keith Richards with a bottle of Jack at the airport; Joni Mitchell, David Crosby and Eric Clapton in a Laurel Canyon song circle; Jackson Browne perched barefoot in the driver’s seat of a Chevy Bel Air; or Janis Joplin dancing at Woodstock, Diltz’s photos captured an era in rock with the same sense of artistic adventure and earthy naturalism as the music. Certainly, without Diltz’s presence as part of the Laurel Canyon tribe, one of the most fertile periods of music in Los Angeles wouldn’t be nearly as richly documented.

Later, Diltz would help his contemporary rock photographers get the respect, acknowledgment and compensation that was likely scarce in their most prominent years by co-founding the Morrison Hotel Gallery, which represents the work of dozens of photographers with fine-art prints. His work has been featured in numerous books, he’s a sought-after commentator on the music scene of the ’60s and ’70s, and his photos remain in demand by those who continue to tell the stories of a golden era in rock.