"Funny Weather", Bozeman Winter '21
This is titled after a really cool book on art and the world by Olivia Laing called Funny Weather. Check it out.
Caption:
“Would there be a future? Was the past irreparably destroyed? What to do?
.
Don’t waste time.
.
Plant rosemary, red-hot poker, santolina;
.
Alchemise terror into art.”
.
- Olivia Laing, Funny Weather
Untitled, Bozeman Winter '21
These are the first edited images I got from my new camera this past December. I really like this series, has a more industrial feel to it than many of my photos. Same style, slightly different feel. This is also when I started to embrace noise and grain in the style of images here. As you’ll see, I have continued to use this editing choice. Untitled, the caption reads:
a walk about for the mind, enjoy.
Invading Light, Bozeman Fall '21
First backfilled series, yay! For some of these, particularly the old ones, I will just be stealing the Instagram captions for the words, then adding to it. Or not. We’ll see… But here’s the first one:
Caption:
One thing I have learned is effort rarely wholly equals an excellent product, and that is extra true in art. I have wanted to do a mini project just like the one here for months and have put it off, but when I finally did, boom it worked. It was easy, inspiring, and fun. That’s what art is about, not necessarily the nine month long photo book project, but the quick night shoot at home that I can feel just as inspired and proud about. Both are equally important and meaningful. Effort doesn’t alway mean excellence, follow what fits.
(click the photo to go to next)
This is one of my favorite photo projects that I’ve done in the past 12 months. I had the idea to do it since I had moved into that space in September ‘21. I remember the first night I slept there, I lay on the floor, on my pad, and stared at the wall where the light was casting a shape ( _MG_2119) on the wall. It was definitely a feeling and image I needed to capture at some point. I ended up editing a different photo (_MG_2117 2) for the final series because it fits better in the group, and was less cluttered, compositionally, without the lines through the light. I feel like Invading Light 1 & 3 capture that the best, but I love the defocused look of Invading Light 2 as well. Most, if not all were shot on manual focus, purposely out of focus, and all were handheld at a slow shutter speed to try and introduce a slightly more unsettled piece to the images. I feel like it turned out so well, and has been an inspiring series for me in the fact that I set out with an intention to capture a feeling from a memory, and it worked.
Another reason I love this one is that it was something I put off so long, and when I finally did it, it seemed to work so easily, hence the caption. It is something I try to remember in all aspects of life. Excellence comes from ease, not effort. That doesn’t mean there isn’t hard work in good art. Just that when hard work is going into good art. It doesn’t necessarily feel like hard work.
Here is a partial contact sheet. I can’t find any of the original, out-of-camera photos, unfortunately, but I have 16 of the ones I took that night, including the five edited versions above.
Yellowstone National Park, Spring '21
Here are a bunch of photos I shoot last spring at Yellowstone Natl Park. I edited 102 images and took 328 (that’s a good keeper rate!), but here today are the, of course, unedited, uncropped contacted sheets with those 102 photos, then a series of 15 images plus a three image mini-series from the drive back. I’ll include the Instagram captions for both, but the 15 image series has five more photos. I wish I could put all 102 edited photos on here but that would be an inefficiently large amount of data to load. So no can do.
Caption for the mini-series:
here are some photos I wanted to share with the world. have a wonderful day!
And here is the caption for the full 15 photo series:
went to Yellowstone finally! it's quite nice, and has lots of interesting textures and colors to photograph. it also reminds me of how cool our public land and national park system is!
Lastly, the contact sheets:
(click to view fullsize)
Hello, New Stuff Happening Here
I am totally changing up the format of my website to cater to a changed artistic style. I have been shooting in a more minimalist way, not necessarily compositionally or in technique, but in process and equipment. What has come of this shift is an evolved style, especially in presentation. Less of a gallery or ‘best images' only’, and more of a project, or story-based approach. Most times I go out and shoot, I edit a series (anywhere from two to seventy plus, depending on the outing), and that becomes a mini-series, wrapping up the outing nice and neat. I gradually work on larger scale multi-outing, or multi-year project(s), but that is a lot of work and I don’t have the time in my life to finish those or have the entire process remotely on the radar.
So, I have found this to be a compromise. I will be backfilling some past series, but not everything. Some past ones and all future ones will have a contact sheet of images, sometimes with all of the photos out of camera, and sometimes a representative selection, depending on how many shots there are (can’t have 730 shot contact sheets…). All contact sheet images are uncropped and straight out of camera, no editing. This will help me catalog my creative process and display that to the few that may be interested.
What this is going to replace is the creative function Instagram served for me, but the platform is too distracting for my productivity, and is restrictive in format… This will hopefully serve much better despite the small additional workload of using this website.
Also, all of my previous ‘published’ images that I will not backfill into posts will slowly populate into the rightful homes in the more folder up top. That’s where you can find the non-series gallery stuff.
Lastly, this definitely has a typo or two, but I don’t care. Thanks to the four people that read this all, and enjoy.