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.
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.
