Where Have I Been?
I don’t even know where to begin trying to come up with a good answer for that.
Here. But lazy. Or adrift. And clearly not paying attention.
I haven’t been doing much shooting since the beginning of COVID really. And I don’t know why. It’s a question I keep asking myself. Creating images is the thing that brings me great joy in life and I haven’t been doing it and I don’t have a good reason for that. But that’s where I find myself digging out from.
And I suppose that sort of answers the question as to why I haven’t been here. I’ve created very little new work and haven’t had much to show you or share.
The brain of a photographer is a funny thing. Even though I haven’t been shooting much with any of my cameras, my mind is always looking for the shot, framing subjects, thinking about how to capture scenes in front of me in my own personal way. It never turns off- I’m always always always looking for the photo. The only difference between now and back when I was shooting a lot is literally just the single press of a button. So it’s especially ridiculous that I haven’t been shooting.
After years of thinking about it and testing it multiple times, I recently bought the Ricoh GR IIIx camera. It’s a street shooter, though it’s never been my intention to use it that way. There is something about the images I can create with this camera that brings me back to my love of photography.
I’ve said this before but my goal is never to represent something the way it actually looks. That isn’t something I care about. It’s why I’ll never be a portrait photographer or a landscape photographer. I only want to capture a mood, a feeling and the way I want things to look, even when they don’t actually look that way. This little camera is helping me do just that and it feels magical.
So I think I’m back.
Time Flies
Waking up from the COVID years and working in a new location in Antarctica.
The glacier shoreline around Palmer Station.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve shown up here. I don’t know what to say other than COVID.
Nothing has been quite the same since all of that began. I was less busy and had more time to write & shoot photos. And I clearly didn’t make the best use of that time. It feels like we’re all coming out of hibernation this year and trying to find our new rhythms & routines.
I’m still working in Antarctica, but I’ve moved over to managing a different station on the Antarctic Peninsula. That’s where I am now and for the next few months. It’s a gorgeous place and feels like the tropics compared to South Pole. It rained today. Which is an odd thing to experience in Antarctica.
In the Neumayer Channel at the end of the long trip to Palmer Station via the Drake Passage.
I feel lucky to be working at this amazing station. I had a good run working at the South Pole starting in 2002. But it’s exciting to be working somewhere a little warmer, with wildlife and incredible views. When it comes to the Oceans vs. Mountains debate, I’m OceanOceanOcean. Mountains are wonderful but OceanOceanOcean! So this feels like a great place to be. AND there are mountain views on a clear day.
The Neumayer Channel on the Antarctic Peninsula.
I don’t totally know what comes next for this languishing blog, or my new half-finished classes or the photography projects that have been sitting not-quite-finished for three years now. But something new will be coming to this space soon…
Arthur Harbour. This is the view out my office window. If I stand on my tip toes.
All photos shot with iPhone 13 Pro. Because that’s how lazy I’ve become:)
Shooting Infrared Photography
I’m always obsessed with something, and my latest obsession is infrared photography.
Oh. My.
I could not love this more! And not just because I love pink so much…
I’ve wanted an IR camera for about 10 years. Ever since I saw infrared photos for the first time. I was completely smitten and knew that one day I wanted to create dreamy photos like the ones I had seen. I also knew that I still had a long ways to go in learning photography and getting better at my craft. So I didn’t get an IR camera right away and I’ve been pursuing many other things related to my photography in the intervening years. But I never forgot about infrared and frequently would go looking for beautiful IR images online.
Sitting at home in isolation for so many months this year, really gave me a lot of time to think about where I want to take my photography and I realized it was time to take the plunge into infrared photography. And, not being one to do things half-heartedly, I didn’t go for a filter but jumped right in and bought a new DSLR camera and had it converted to Infrared. This basically means, you can never use it for anything else. You can’t take regular photos with it. It’s a commitment! But I always knew this would be something that I would love.
Then I started reading everything I could on how to do this. I watched more marginal-to-useless YouTube videos on IR than I can count and searched everywhere for information on shooting with an IR camera and then how to edit the photos. It was surprisingly difficult to find good information and it was incredibly frustrating in the beginning. But after a few disastrous attempts, I was finally able to find enough information and sort out a workflow that helps me create the images I want.
I’m working on a more in-depth tutorial which I’ll post on my resources page in the next couple of weeks, but for now, here’s just a very quick run down of what the process looks like.
This is what the photo looks like straight out of my camera:
You really can’t edit this version in Lightroom, or pretty much any other standard editor at this point. The problem is the temperature of the photos. It has to be changed too much and most editors don’t give you enough latitude to fix it. So, I had to download the Canon photo editor for this camera. I bring the photo into the Canon editor and make a temperature correction. It looks very subtle in this one, but you have to do it or you will have difficulty editing the photo anywhere else. Temperature correction:
Once the photo has been temperature corrected, then it can be taken into Photoshop, or another editing program that can let you channel swap the colors. I won’t explain what that is here, but I basically set up a Photoshop action to run all of those steps for me. So at a click of the button, the channels are color swapped and this is the result:
All of that was the difficult stuff to figure out over the last couple of months. Once the photo is at this point, then I take it into Lightroom, or transfer to my iPhone, and begin the real, or I suppose my ‘normal’ editing. That’s where the magic happens… And this is the result:
I love editing photos and since I am almost never trying to represent reality in my work, this is a method that works really well for me in helping me to create the photos I imagine. Here’s the before & after:
You can do a lot of bending with the IR color. You do have to be EXTRA careful not to blow the highlights. They seem to be even more difficult to recover. Here’s just one more example, before & after, and you can see I’ve blown the highlights a bit and didn’t recover them quite as well as I’d like:
There’s so much that I love about shooting IR. I just love the dreamy, reality-but-not-reality photos you can create. Winter is my favorite season so I also love that you can turn any image into a winter-like dreamland too.
So there you have it. A quick look into shooting with an infrared camera. I’m putting together a detailed tutorial on shooting IR. If you’re interested, you can sign up for my IR specific newsletter below:
Love & Equality
This is a tough time for all of us to be living through. Watching the world burn as we simultaneously try to exit a pandemic and get our collective shit together in the most important election year of our lifetimes is the challenge leveled by 2020.
It’s hard to know how it’s all going to turn out. My heart grieves for so many things right now. Black lives senselessly lost, the inhumanity that we level on each other, the inhumanity of our President, COVID deaths that don’t seem to end… It’s hard to know how to best help with any of these things.
The only thing I know is that we must find love for each other and bring equality to everyone if we’re going to make it through. There is no other way as a collective of humans that we should treat each other. There is no other way that we all survive this together…
Isolation Nation
Today marks 5 weeks since I’ve been ‘isolating’ at home. My home consists of 350 square feet in a tiny, ancient studio apartment that is mostly filled with good light and friendly plants. It’s not so bad considering that when I live at South Pole, my personal space is only 15-20 % of what I have here. It felt palatial at first but I have to admit that the walls are starting to close in. The light makes me want to rush outside and see what’s going on, take a few photos, wander the city. The plants need siblings, but that will have to wait.
Life has become narrow, ever watching out the windows and wishing to participate in life again. I was an obsessive numbers watcher at the beginning of all this. The first time I looked there were 93,000 people infected around the world. Five weeks later we’re at 2.2 million people, knowing there are probably many more that haven’t been able to be tested. I can’t look at the numbers anymore. I lost interest and had to turn away when they became unfathomable. If felt a little hard to breathe looking at the death tolls and imagining how many people are now longer with us, how many families will grieve forever.
I know that the best I can do is be kind to those that need it, press forward with my work, learn some new skills and will spring into existence through my windows. I’m trying to do all of those things but it’s hard to focus, hard to press forward when so much is unknown about so many things.
For now, we all continue to wait. And I wonder when it’s all said and done, perhaps a year from now, or whenever, if we will even remember these days and how strange they feel.
Be safe my friends. I hope to see you all back in the world again soon…
Creating During Corona
My ‘office’ at home.
So much has changed in the last month. A month ago I was returning from four months in Antarctica and two weeks of travel through New Zealand on my way home. It was the loveliest two weeks after a great season on the ice. On my way I had plans to stop in LA to visit my elderly uncle and it didn’t hit me until I arrived that I should stay as far away from him as possible after all of the traveling I’d been doing. So I didn’t get to see him after all. Then March pretty much went downhill from there in terms of socializing, catching up with people I hadn’t seen in months and living a normal life.
Here we are. All holed up in our own spaces. Some of us working, some of us desperately wishing we were. I’ve been fortunate so far that my day job hasn’t been impacted and I can work from home. I live in a 350 sq. ft studio apartment (that I LOVE!) about 2 blocks from the capitol in downtown Denver. It isn’t exactly a home office that I have to work from…I have friends with home offices bigger than my entire apartment. It’s more like moving 5 feet from the couch to the kitchen table to get to work. But I wouldn’t have it any other way than working in my own space during these weird times.
As an introvert and a serious homebody, when I’m not traveling, this is sort of like a mini-dream come true being able to stay at home without feeling guilty. I love that I have hours more each day to myself now that I’m not commuting or doing any of the other myriad things that seem to eat up my weekdays outside of work hours. I love that I have the time and head space to slow down and really think about my creative projects and where I’m going with them. This has been the biggest benefit. It’s hard to be still when we’re running around ‘living’ life every day.
I’m trying to take advantage of this time to increase the time I spend creating every day. To hone my skills, learn new creative tools for my craft and generally get my creative shit together a bit more. So far, it’s been going great and I think I’m making the best possible use of my time. I’ve got new project ideas and I’m working hard to wrap up a couple of projects that have been in progress for a while. It feels a bit indulgent to have all this time to do these things, but I’m trying not to let that slow me down.
Social Distancing
These are weird times. This is a terribly ravaging illness racing through our populations and it’s hard to watch so many people not being able to make it through. And it’s hard knowing that we still have a long ways to go before we get through this. But in some ways, these are still times to be grateful for. We all get to slow down and appreciate our friends & family a bit more. We all get to spend a bit more time pondering our next moves and how we can create our best lives out of them. We all get to feel connected to something global, not the corona itself, but the solidarity of trying to help each other through it. I’m so delighted by the incredible number of acts of kindness that the world is doing and sharing right now. It’s a rare thing to see and I feel lucky to be able to observe and participate in it.
Yes, these are weird times, and hard times. But there is much to be grateful for. There is much that we can do to improve our lives during the stillness, and the lives of others. Be safe my friends, look out for those around you and remember that we are all in this together. Brighter days are coming.
Paris moon.
Return to the South Pole aka Home Away from Home
Baslers at South Pole Station. We flew in on a Basler this year.
We arrived back at South Pole Station about 10 days ago. It was the fastest, smoothest trip ever from Denver to South Pole but it wasn’t much time to wrap my brain around just how far I traveled in such a short time. It’s always a little surreal arriving back here but it’s also a place that feels more like home than anywhere else for me now.
The flag flying over South Pole Station. All points north.
My first photowalk of the season always makes me appreciate being here again so much. It can be easy to forget where we are when we get busy with work during the season but walking around before the masses arrive, seeing this place as if it’s the first time, is a certain kind of magic.
The front of South Pole Station.
These are just a few shots from my photo walkabout yesterday. It was about -40F without windchill and an incredibly lovely gray day. Those are my favorite days here because I’m not a fan of sunny, bright blue skies. I just don’t love them like other people do, so for me it was a perfect day. I only saw one person outside while I was out wandering. Having the whole outdoors to my self is one of the coolest things about being here. It’s flat & white for as far as you can see and not seeing any other people, you can almost imagine what it was like to be one of the early explorers crossing the lonely continent. Of course now e have a behemoth of a station which is probably quite disappointing to the intrepid modern day explorers that ski across the continent and come visit us.
The main entrance of South Pole Station.
It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been coming here for 17 years now. Originally I was only coming for a 4 month contract after leaving the tropical island I was living on in the Pacific. I never imagined then that I would be coming here for so long but as most people who work in Antarctica will tell you, it has a magical pull that is hard to get away from…
A back entrance to the station. Yep, nearly buried by snow drifts…
I’ve been thinking about shooting the station in black & white for so many years now because there really isn’t that much color here to begin with. I knew it would be perfect for the stark contrast you see everywhere here and I don’t think I was wrong. Shooting in black & white yesterday was such pure joy. I think I might just spend the next 4 months shooting colorless images.
Firefighting equipment on the edge of the skiway.
Some facts about South Pole Station. The max capacity of the station is 150 people in the summer. In the winter we have about 42 people that stay behind for the long winter night. South Pole technically only has one sunrise and one sunset per year, so it’s daylight 24/7 while I’m here for the summer. Our lowest temperature ever was -117F and our highest was 9.9F on Christmas day a few years ago. Most years, we are lucky is we see 0F.
Ceremonial pole marker at South Pole Station.
There are so many things I love about living here. This community is made up of the sweetest, most creative and thoughtful people I’ve every worked with. It is filled with fascinating & eclectic people that continually teach and remind me that we really can do anything we put our minds to.
I am surrounded by incredible humans here, which is the reason I’ve been coming back for so many years. There are times I think I’d like to have a ‘normal’ life but it doesn’t generally last very long because there isn’t much that compares with Antarctica and the people that are drawn to it.
South Pole Station.
This is just a small look into life here. If you want to see more, you can sign up for my newsletter to follow my adventures…and more photos to come.
And if you’re interested in working in Antarctica, you can send me an email at andrea @ andreadixon.com and I’ll hook you up with the job links.
Underneath South Pole Station.
10 Best Creative Photography & Digital Art Apps of 2019
Photography apps have come SUCH a long way in the last few years. If you haven’t given them a whirl, it’s a good time to think about it as there are a lot of quality apps now and I’m continually impressed with how much I can do with them. I use a few dozen different apps, but these are the 10 best, in my opinion.
Afterlight- this app does my heavy lifting for basic editing
TouchRetouch- my go to for removing objects
iColorama- where art meets app!
DistressedFX- textures & color is what this app is all about
Lensflare- what I use to manufacture light
Leonardo- I use this one for layers & removing backgrounds
ArtStudio- I use this one for layers too
VSCO- a great all around editing app
Lightroom- another great all around editing app and does fantastic with lights & darks
Mextures- for adding textures & colors
There isn’t much that you can’t do with this combination of Apps. They are pure magic.
There are dozens of other great apps that I use but there are too many to list here and really, it’s better to stick to a few and get to know them really well.
Romance is Dead
Every year I take a few road trips to eastern Colorado for the big skies, open plains and slow roads. I love shooting farms, grass on the roadsides, wildflowers and I consider myself lucky if I find water towers, trains or old cars. The old farms & dried up towns fascinate me and I never get tired of wandering to these out of the way places to see what there is to see.
This trip I decided to go to Pawnee National Grasslands. I’ve seen it on the map and dreamed about going for years but had never quite made it that direction, even though it’s only 2 hours from Denver. I had such romantic notions of majestic open grasslands for miles. Unspoiled, untouched and pretty much left the way the native Americans would have experienced them.
I was incredibly disappointed to find that these lands have been badly torn up for what I can only surmise is greed. I.nearly turned around to go home. The landscape has small pockets of manmade devastation everywhere. Dozens of gas & oil rigs, and the associated infrastructure, spill across these grasslands like open wounds festering on the land. Whatever protections they may have once had have been seriously degraded. The land is injured in ways that it will likely never recover from.
Needless to say, it was a very disappointing trip in this respect. But in terms of making photographs, I took it as a challenge to try to shoot around the spoilage and create something beautiful anyway. If you stop at just the right place on the hill or crouch down just low enough… you can create photos that don’t resemble reality at all. There were some beautiful things about this area but they were difficult to find. Challenge accepted. You can see my results below.
Denver Abstraction
One of the reasons I insist on living downtown is so that I can be close to all of the fantastic city buildings that makeup the city of Denver. Most photographers are particularly drawn to one or a couple of subjects in particular. At the top of the list for me is architecture with good lines. Denver has no shortage of buildings with great lines and I spend a lot of time circling them and considering the best way to capture them.
These were taken on a short walk I took on a Friday night at the museums that are 3 blocks from my apartment. The Denver Art Museum is probably my favorite in terms of the building itself. Sharp angles loom high over the sidewalks and walkways. A bit of a jenga building from the outside and theinterior is no less interesting.
My favorite museum if the Clyfford Still museum though. His artwork is breathtaking and I love that he insisted that his work only be shown together and with no one else’s work. He was absolutely right in knowing that’s the best way to see and understand his work. This museum does a stellar job exhibiting his art. I absolutely love shooting this building with the Denver Art Museum in the background.
Another New Beginning
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
This is the launch post of my new website, finally using my own name. It’s something I’m reeeeally excited about. I waited far too long to do it and had to learn a lot to get here.
The last seven years have been a wild and amazing journey in my life. I wondered back then what the hell I was doing as I turned my life upside down in a painful way. I only knew that I had to, so I did, but I had absolutely no idea what to do next.
I love looking back now and being able to connect the dots. Seeing how other people are happier, I’m happier and all the stops along the way that brought me right here. Seeing and doing so many things that I only dreamed of before.
I couldn’t have known it then, but burying myself in my creative pursuits was probably the best thing I could have done. Learning to see differently while creating my photos also helped me see things differently in my life. Coming back to writing after so many years away was like a life-affirming hug from an old friend who understands you like no one else. We’ll never part ways again. These are the things that have sustained me, along with incredible friends that stuck by me and understood. (You know who you are!)
Now I find myself here with photography front & center in my life. Teaching others and creating my best work yet. Feet firmly on the ground knowing where I’m going now and what to do next. With this new website, finally owning my work under my own name.
I love knowing that the dots all lead us to exactly where we should be at exactly the right time… The universe always has a way of bringing things around full circle, sometimes when you least expect it.