03. July 2018

I recently spent 10 days exploring Northern Portugal, namely the city of Porto, the 2nd largest city in the country. The city sits along the banks of the Duoro River, where it feeds into the Atlantic. It is an easy place to visit; friendly people, good public transportation, and not quite as crowded as other places. I wanted to visit a medieval city, complete with old buildings and cobblestone streets. I had originally considered Italy, but I knew that it would be much more crowded and...

20. February 2018

I am convinced I can take meaningful images (at least to me) just about anywhere. Sure, I am stimulated and awestruck by the beauty of the American Southwest. I like nothing more than to spend time down in the canyons of the red rock country or up high in the Rockies; it can even add a degree of spiritualism to my creative endeavors. But what about the urban landscape or local objects? There is still color, lines, and forms there as well. In my premise of “looking vs seeing”, it is often...

04. September 2017

Image capture is the beginning; clicking the shutter captures the moment. It is from here that I begin to mold the light into the vision and emotion that I was experiencing and wish to convey. In another blog post, I wrote as to why I use the RAW Format to capture the image data. Shooting RAW allows me the most leeway to mold the image and develop my interpretation. Viewing “finished” photographs on a computer monitor has opened up the possibility of viewing all of the images of the world....

09. August 2017

During all my years in the darkroom I was never able to quickly go in, print, and leave feeling content. I would end up spending hours “working” the print, dodging and burning, changing scale, using a more contrasty paper, etc. For better or worse, this has not changed for me in the digital age. I have to “work the image” for the print to convey the emotion, or vision I had at the moment of capture. This is why I never shoot jpeg files. The RAW file format may be a familiar term to...

01. June 2017

The process of infrared photography using a specially converted camera is understandably misunderstood. People often ask me how infrared photographs can exist if we cannot see the infrared spectrum. Others ask, what is infrared color? Digital camera sensors only capture light, not color. Color actually happens later. It doesn’t matter if the light being measured by the camera sensor contains visible wavelengths or not. The “light” is still measured and recorded. Placing a filter over the...

01. May 2017

We are so lucky to live in a country where so much land is owned by the people. 640 million acres, or about 28% of the 2.27 billion acres of land in the United States is trusted and managed by the federal government. Here in Utah, over 60% of our state is public land. To me this is positive news! I am all for protecting our wild lands and keeping it wild. This untamed land is the playground for the mind and spirit. And there is a lot more here than the “Famous Vistas”.

18. April 2017

Don’t get me wrong; I love a gorgeous landscape image as much as the next person. Who doesn’t like to see well done sunrise photographs of the Teton Range or Grand Canyon, or the glow of color through red rock arches. I believe it is innate and instinctive to look at these scenes and marvel at the beauty that we are blessed to see in our natural world. I will never tire of and forever marvel at the “World Beautiful”. But that doesn’t mean I want to photograph a recognized image all...