You think you know Neil Young, eh?

Nobody knows Neil Young quite like Joel Bernstein.

Bernstein, a respected rock and roll photographer and Young archivist, estimates that he has snapped some 10,000 photos of Young over the years. Bernstein also reckons that he spent "19 ½ years - and one day" in his task of archiving Young's recordings.

"Neil is like a lighthouse beam. He has an incredibly intense focus in a very narrow area to the exclusion of all else," Bernstein told me one evening last week at a well attended exhibit of photos by Bernstein and Henry Diltz at the Morrison Hotel Gallery.

Young is best known for his remarkable solo career, in which he has incorporated multiple popular music styles, from country to grunge. He first became known to rock fans as a member of the seminal Los Angeles band Buffalo Springfield during the late 1960s. Not long after the Springfield parted ways, Young joined forces with David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, with whom he has performed and recorded music now and then over the past four decades.

Bernstein got his start in rock photography by forging a stranger-than-fiction connection with Joni Mitchell. When Bernstein was 16 years old and living with his parents in suburban Philadelphia in the late 1960s, when Mitchell, then at the start of her spectacular career, asked Bernstein to be her photographer. The "Almost-Famous"-like experience changed his life.

And high school? "I had good grades and good boards but what does it matter when you're hanging out with Joni and Neil?" Bernstein said, smiling broadly.

Before long, Bernstein and his camera became a staple on the New York City rock scene. "I used to take a Trailways bus home to Philadelphia at three in the morning, grab my books and collapse into homeroom," he laughed. "The kid sitting next to me would say, 'How was your weekend?' and I'd tell him I was hanging out in New York City, shooting rock stars."

Bernstein eventually took many iconic photographs, such as the album covers for Young's "After the Goldrush" and Mitchell's "Hejira."

But he has always kept his life in proportion. "I could never hope to be as cool as them," he said.

"What makes Joel's photos so special is that they don't look staged or posed," said Arthur Rosato, a fellow photographer and video and music producer who worked closely with Bernstein during Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue U.S. in the spring of 1976. "Because Joel is also an excellent musician and guitar technician, he brings a sense of empathy for musicians to his photography work."