Tag Archives: landscape

January 21, 2017 – Blades of Grass

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I always love it when a completely candid photograph manages to look thoroughly manicured and staged. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes the light is just good, the subject is in just the right place, and the resulting photograph winds up with wonderful color and texture.

This, obviously, is a piece that’s intended to be appreciated on its purely aesthetic merits. There’s no lesson or philosophy here, other than a very broad appreciation of nature and color. I had gotten up in the morning to start the day off with a hike up in the hills and noticed that the desert was quickly coming back to life. It was springtime and we had received some decent rain, and the dry, straw-colored desert landscape was turning green.

I hope you enjoy!

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January 20, 2017 – Monsoon In Arizona

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Sometimes you just get lucky.

While living in Bisbee, Arizona, up on the hilltop on High Road (an appropriate name for a road in a town known for it’s debauchery and drinking and weed smoking), I sat on the wrap-around deck and looked across the canyon toward ‘B Hill.’ I was home sick with strep throat, and a monsoon storm rolled through town, dumping rain and lighting on our scenic little corner of the cosmos. I set up my tripod and started snapping at the rainbow, thinking it might be a fun image for our liberal little town.

Bisbee is know for it’s raucous gay pride weekend, it’s open and accepting politics, it’s unique character. The first microbrewery in the entire state of Arizona was opened in Bisbee, and Bisbee was the first municipality in the state to legalize gay marriage – a symbolic victory, of course, as these marriages were only considered valid within the city limits at that time.

A rainbow over Bisbee seemed like it’d be a fun picture, naturally.

But then I captured this, and I was awe-struck. I’ve never been a storm chaser or a lightning photographer, but the composition was so astonishing and accidental, I absolutely had to share it. I hope you enjoy.

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January 19, 2017 – Waterfront

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I’ve often said that with certain types of photography all you have to do is let nature do the hard work. We have all the necessary technology to document the beautiful moments – all one has to do is open their eyes, recognize that the moment is occurring, and use their tools to document it. Sure, it’s a simplistic view, but it isn’t far from the truth. Most photographers are witnesses with useful tools. When we aren’t creating tableaux – constructing scenes with actors and makeup and wardrobe and artificial light – we are witnesses doing little else than capturing happenstance moments.

This was one of those moments. It’s a scene that hundreds of people walk by every single day, and I don’t doubt that many of them take pause, look across the water, and appreciate the view. I don’t doubt that this exact photograph has been made several times over. But this image is mine. It was a great day, walking down the streets of a strange town.

What I have noticed, as a photographer, is that my best moments, almost always, are experienced alone.

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January 16, 2017 – Snow Field

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What better way to embrace the winter than by making photographs and artwork that celebrate it? We’re in that stretch of winter where things often start to really slow down; I know a lot of people who dread the upcoming February storms. I left the Midwest to escape the cold, but whenever I return I feel as though I have a much deeper appreciation for the natural beauty of the Plains States, as flat and sparse as the landscapes often are.

We always take a little bit of our home town with us when we leave.

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January 14, 2017 – The Hilltop Cross

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Today I stumbled across an old photo, taken during the first few months I had lived in Bisbee, Arizona. It’s a mile-high historic town where one of the largest copper mining operations in the world existed. On a, 80 story hilltop overlooking the canyons the comprise most of the town is a makeshift shrine, evidently constructed by a single individual, who hauled mortar and supplies up the trail to the top of the hill, one small load at a time.

The folks that live in town have added to the shrine their own little flourishes. Candles, prayer flags, and sculptures have slowly accumulated, and the cross at the top of the hill kind of belongs to the whole community now. Even in the tumult of my last few months in Bisbee, with a flagging relationship and commensurate flagging reputation among some hostile locals, I always found peace hiking up into the hills to look at the view and be alone with my thoughts.

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January 11, 2017 – Clouds

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I moved back to the desert for a reason. This is one of many.

There’s a quality to the light, to the landscape and skies, that amazed me when I first moved here sixteen years ago. I love the monsoon rains, the mountains, the clouds. They say that nature does all of the hard work, and all you have to do is be there to capture it. There’s some truth to that. But it’s so easy to take our experiences for granted. When we see the same landscape, the same sky, the same friends, the same lover – when we see it every day, we appreciate it less.

Being an artist is recognizing this tendency, and never taking anything for granted.

This is all temporary, and it’s all incredibly amazing. I love being here, and I am in love with life.

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January 07, 2017 – Sunset

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Landscape photography is about as old as photography itself – it has reached a level of cliche that’s hard to escape. At the same time, it isn’t the easiest art-form, either. We all have friends who have taken that ‘epic’ sunset photograph, replete with power lines and ugly houses in the foreground that completely distract from the colors, the clouds, and the experience.

I’m not a naysayer – I love that we all have cameras in our pockets, on our phones, that allow us to document majestic moments. But this doesn’t make us all artists. There’s something to be said about composition, intent, and execution. Cameras allow us all to be witnesses to nature’s majesty, but that doesn’t make us all artists. What I love about camera technology is that it hints at the possibility that we all CAN be artists – the tools to make exciting images are completely democratized, totally universal and, as I already mentioned, in each and every one of our pockets.

Get out there, guys. Keep your eyes open. Make something. Nature does all of the heavy lifting – all you have to do is recognize the beauty, pick up your camera, and give it a go.

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January 06, 2017 – The Landscape

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After living in Kansas City for over a year, it feels so good being back in the desert, where I belong. There’s nothing like an Arizona sunrise. At every hour, there are wonderful things to photograph, mountains to hike, winding roads to drive down. This, to me, is paradise.

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January 04, 2017 – Snowstorm In Arizona

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After a glorious New Years celebration in Sedona, Arizona, we decided to take the long way back to Tucson. Although it was sixty miles out of our way, Flagstaff was too close not to pass through. As we approached the mountaintop city, whiteout conditions descended from the hills, a big black mass of winter fury.

Naturally, once we passed through the maelstrom, it was necessary to stop and get our boots wet. Virgin snow is beautiful, but even more-so to the desert-rat. It’s a rare sight for Arizonans – and even though I’m from Kansas, I have to admit an affinity for a landscape draped in fresh snow.

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January 01, 2017 – New Landscapes

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I started this project last year and I didn’t even make it to the three month mark. Well, we just said goodbye to the year 2016, and I’m going to give this another solid run. One photograph a day – or painting, or drawing, or whatever – for the full 365. I’m beginning this series with a photograph taken with my phone, New Years Day, after waking up hangover-free to a rainy Sedona, Arizona landscape.

It was a good hike, with good, loving company. The best possibly way I think I have ever welcomed the beginning of a new year.

I hope you’ll send me some support and positive thoughts, and I will try my best to keep this project on its feet.
Happy New Year!

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
~Stephen King

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