A Change of Pace

I started this web­site for my por­trait and wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy, and peo­ple are pri­mar­ily what I shoot.  How­ever, every cre­ative per­son needs a break, and needs a way to keep things fresh.  This week, I’m vis­it­ing my mother in Ash­land, Ore­gon, where I am treated to the above view from my bed­room window–yes, lit­er­ally!  I promised myself that this trip wouldn’t be focused around pho­tog­ra­phy, and it hasn’t been, really, but it still pro­vided a great oppor­tu­nity to shoot some land­scapes, some­thing I don’t do much of ordi­nar­ily.  Land­scapes are cre­atively charg­ing because they are so dif­fer­ent than my nor­mal shoot­ing style–they are delib­er­ate and pen­sive, where I am usu­ally impro­vi­sa­tional and on the move.  They are stopped down and on a tri­pod at base ISO, where I am usu­ally shoot­ing wide open, hand­held at higher ISOs.  Land­scapes obvi­ously don’t fea­ture peo­ple (generally).

It’s been grat­i­fy­ing to get some land­scapes I’m really pleased with.  I feel like I finally have some that aren’t just good to my stan­dards, but to other stan­dards, as well.

Even though this trip wasn’t specif­i­cally about pho­tog­ra­phy, I find that I engage more with a place when I think about it as a pho­tog­ra­pher.  It gets me out and about, look­ing for beau­ti­ful things, inter­est­ing things, ironic things.  In pre­vi­ous trips to visit my mother, I’d ven­tured out a lit­tle and appre­ci­ated the beauty that this state and region have to offer, but I had never really explored.  With this trip, I feel that Hanna, Isaac and I have had a much bet­ter oppor­tu­nity to explore this beau­ti­ful, amaz­ing place and hope­fully, with these images, I can bring some of that expe­ri­ence back to oth­ers (espe­cially those back home on the East Coast).  The fact of the mat­ter is that Ore­gon is an excep­tion­ally and exquis­itely beau­ti­ful place, and I am extremely for­tu­nate to have a mother who lives right in the mid­dle of it all (fig­u­ra­tively, not literally).

I’m still tak­ing the time to shoot the other stuff I shoot–the rural archi­tec­ture, the quirky and the colorful.

And, of course, I haven’t neglected the things I shoot most, just been a lit­tle bit more, um, free about it… :)