Birding, Fishing, or Photographing?

Last summer and fall Tommy would ask with a little bit of regularity which was my favorite activity between fly fishing, birding, and photography. I would explain to him in fairly simple terms: that photography was my favorite, followed closely by fly fishing, and then birding, but birding was something I could do while photographing, or fly fishing.

My longer answer is that three pursuits are perfectly compatible and complimentary: birding is something I can do while doing the other two, and as I’ve gotten more into birding, my time photographing and/or fly fishing has only been enriched. No longer is the birdsong I hear in the land or on the river only a pleasant sound, but in addition to that, those chirps, songs, and calls add another element with which I grow closer to and gain a deeper understanding of the earth and nature, and my place within it.

Fly Fishing on the Little Bear River

Western Meadowlark

Photographing Salt Creek

The Avett Brothers

I’ve written several posts here on the blog about music that moves me, and a few of those posts deal with the Avett Brothers in some way or another. My most recent post dealing with music addressed the Avett Brothers specifically, and how I first met them, and how they had risen immediately to become my favorite group, to remain there for more than a decade and a half, to then gradually come to occupy the number two slot, even if it’s in such close proximity to Iron & Wine’s top slot that there’s virtually no clear dividing line. Both groups/artists have such a strong impact and influence on me that now, a few months after publishing that post, I think it would be more accurate to say that they both occupy the top slot.

Years ago, over the course of a week, I recorded my journey from only knowing the music of Top 40 radio stations to being shown a whole new world of Indie music, and I thought it would be worth adapting, and perhaps adding more to the story for publication here:

Up until the second semester of my sophomore year of college, I really only knew the world of Top 40 Pop, Alternative and Rock music. My vector for music discovery in high school and the first part of college was only through the radio stations of Southeast Idaho, which in the mid- to late-1990’s and early 2000’s would have been Z103 and KBear 101*. Whether we had any radio stations that would have played any indie band, like a college radio station, I don’t know or don’t remember. Idaho Falls didn’t have a very diverse selection of radio stations then, and it may still be the case, but I feel comparing today’s musical landscape in the digital age of streaming to that of 30 years ago is a little unfair. That all changed when I met who would become my best friend in college, Scott Wheeler. He had a huge treasure trove of music that he began sharing with me, and it wouldn’t be hyperbolic or inaccurate to say it was life-changing. He first introduced me to Death Cab for Cutie, Interpol, Kings of Leon, The Shins, The Stills, The Thrills, Wilco, Air, Athlete, Franz Ferdinand, and Iron & Wine. It’s quite likely that had I not been introduced to Iron & Wine when I was, I may not have come to love Sam Beam’s music as much as I did and do. Later, either during my senior year or very shortly after college, I came across NPR’s All Songs Considered podcast, and that has been a primary vector for new music discovery ever since, but had I not been introduced to the aforementioned artists, I may not have been in a position to even come across it or care if I did. But the music sharing between Scott and I and Darren Clark, our professor, continued throughout the rest of college.

After learning of the Avett Brothers, and almost as immediately as their rise to the top of my list of favorite musicians, the banjo became my favorite instrument. I’d played the guitar—I never was really great at it—but the more I listened to Talk on Indolence, the more I knew I needed a banjo. I eventually got one as a Christmas gift, and then got another a year or so later. Like the guitar, I never got great at it, I never have learned the banjo picking, and I haven’t really played either instrument with any regularity for years. But the point is, that before the Avetts, the banjo wasn’t a favorite instrument—not disliked, but not really fully appreciated either. It was in bands like Sufjan Stevens and Modest Mouse that I noticed interesting ways the banjo could be used. Iron & Wine has a lot of banjo, but it’s used in an expected way and an expected genre (this is in no means meant to disparage Sam Beam in any way at all, or say that his use of the banjo is any less successful or meaningful). I came across Modest Mouse “on my own” during a summer break between college semesters, and Perfect Disguise was the song that got me hooked. There’s a really good banjo part in the song, which I didn’t immediately notice or recognize as a banjo. Though I missed it at first, it’s a crucial element to the song.

Air’s Alpha Beta Gaga is another fun song: it has a bright and dancy beat, a great banjo line, which doesn’t really show itself until nearly 3 minutes in, and it’s got a fun whistling melody, if you’re into songs you can whistle along with.

While Elliott Smith and the Avett Brothers don’t share many (any?) of the same qualities, I can’t not acknowledge the huge influence and impact he had and still has on my musical tastes. While I don’t remember exactly which songs or albums I was first exposed to, I remember vividly when and were I was when I first heard his last album. So many of his songs are stellar, but Sweet Adeline, Junk Bond Trader, Cupid’s Track and Coast to Coast are all bangers.

I mentioned Sufjan Stevens earlier, and another favorite song is All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands. It’s a pretty simple song: the same melody is played for the entire duration of the four minutes of the song, but I still enjoy the song. And though there is no banjo in the song, Sister has long been a favorite of mine. And while we’re talking about Sufjan Stevens, his Christmas album is simply fantastic.

Another early discovery was the Be Good Tanyas. I came across them around the same time as Scott introduced me to Sufjan Stevens, and songs like Ship Out on the Sea, Reuben, Littlest Bird, and It’s Not Happening really hooked me, and then my appreciation for them was solidified when Hello Love came out, and For the Turnstiles instantaneously became my favorite Be Good Tanyas song.

At the start of this post, I began with the basic premise that I wouldn’t have liked the Avett Brothers as much or at all had I not previously heard any of these artists I’ve talked about thus far, but if I take a step back and look at the big picture, I think the Avetts weren’t as far outside of the musical vocabulary I possessed before 2007 (when I first heard the Avetts) or before 2002 (when I began learning of this new musical world) as I may have let on. With influences like Nirvana (an early description of the Avett Brothers I heard was that they were a cross between Nirvana and Alisson Kraus, and that their music as banjo music you can head-bang to) and Pearl Jam, I’m sure I would have liked the Avetts, or at least Talk on Indolence, when I heard them/that song.

Another previously mentioned artist is Wilco. Darren introduced me to the genius of this group and Jeff Tweedy sometime in 2003. I think. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was my first exposure to them, and that album to this day is one of my favorite albums ever. A Ghost is Born quickly rose pretty high on my list of favorite albums, with At Least That’s What You Said being my favorite from that album. They’ve released several albums since then, and the group just keeps proving to me that they belong high in my list of favorites.

Lastly, I have to acknowledge the Elephant 6 Recording Company. So many of my favorite groups are part of this collective: Circulatory System, The Olivia Tremor Control, Beulah, Elf Power, Apples in Stereo, and Neutral Milk Hotel, this last group being my first exposure to any of the Elephant 6 artists. As is the case with Elliott Smith, none of these bands are real closely stylistically related to the Avett Brothers, but they all (some of them make some very unique—even weird—music) played a huge part in shaping my my musical tastes, regardless of how or when I came across them.

I made a playlist at the time I first wrote this over ten years ago which contains all the songs mentioned above plus many others that I can point to that led me to the Avett Brothers.

 *In this, I’m having a bit of a Mandela Effect moment: KBear’s Wikipedia page says the station first aired in 1999, but I could have sworn it was on air at least a year before that.

Behind the Scenes, February 2025

During the Christmas holiday I printed some photographs for woven pieces, with the intention of working on them then, but instead focused on making some carbon prints and cyanotypes, and those inject prints have sat in my drawer.

About a week ago I finally started working on them, and as of the time of this writing, I’ve completed the weaving of two pieces, and am beginning the cutting of a third. Check out the videos and photos below for some behind the scenes looks into my process.

I think I’ve stumbled onto something that has potential in this last photo.

Parks Project, Volume 2

Back in November, in a “Here’s a Thought” episode of Brooks Jensen’s podcast, he talked about whether a body of work is finished or concluded. He mentioned book trilogies, specifically the Lord of the Rings. Each of the first two books in the series is done, or a finished novel, but the whole story of Frodo and Sam and Gandalf and Aragorn wasn’t concluded until the end of the third.

I’ve never really felt that my parks project as “finished.” Even though I had a “complete” body of work for a B.F.A. project; even though I haven’t made as many photographs as I could or should to really carry on that body of work, I have always intended to continue making photographs of parks, perhaps until I’m too old and worn out to do so. So my B.F.A. project could be Volume 1. But then how would I define a Volume 2? Does that volume begin upon the closing of my B.F.A. show, and any image made in and of parks between circa May 2005 and late-2024 comprises Volume 2? What would I do with a Volume 3 then? What themes would emerge from Volume 2? What would I need to do with a Volume 3? What is or would be the difference between: my B.F.A. project, the work I’ve created in the years 2005-2024, and the work moving forward? What do/will they each do or say?

All of that is taking each volume as a chronological progression. So far, all the images I’ve made in 20 years have been under the same premise—parks are an imitation of Nature, a manicured version of nature where people can enjoy being outside, whether it be because they lack the means or time to go out to the “real” Nature; indeed, I’ve included several images made in the intervening years in the project. So is a chronological approach the best way to treat the volumization of the work? Or, would it be better to take a thematical approach? Short answer: probably the latter. Long answer: most likely the latter, but if I do, I need to spend a lot of time with all of the work I’ve made thus far, and I need to get busy making new work. And that’s not a hard thing to do: there are a lot of parks just in Brigham to photograph. Then there’s Ogden, etc… In other words, I’ve got no shortage of parks to photograph. But then, what do I do with my B.F.A. project? Do I “archive” that body of work, and restructure everything I’ve made in relation to parks?

Another thing to consider is the types of capture method: most of the photographs I’ve made in the last 20 years have been done digitally, where everything for my B.F.A. project was done with my 5x7 large format camera. Do I need to return exclusively to large format, or just make images with whichever camera I feel like using at the time? How do I treat those images I’ve made digitally and have chosen to leave as color images, vs. those made with the 5x7 on black and white film?

There is a lot for me to consider moving forward, but in the mean time, enjoy a few of my favorite photographs of some parks I’ve photographed through the years.

Light Descending

In the canonized account of Joseph Smith’s First Vision of God The Father and Jesus Christ, he tells of entering a grove of trees to pray to ask of God which church he should join in order to obtain eternal salvation. After he arrived at a predetermined location, he knelt to do what he had come to do. Joseph says that as he began to pray—his first attempt to give a vocalized prayer—he was gripped by an unseen power, “who,” he said, “had such marvelous power as [he] had never before felt in any being,” bent on his destruction. This power had such influence on him as to bind his tongue and plunge him into despair, but just as Joseph was on the verge of giving in to despair, he “saw a pillar of light…[descending] gradually” delivering him from this invisible enemy. In this pillar of light appeared two Beings: God the Father and His Son.

Drawing from this experience, I created the piece seen below, titled Light Descending—Delivered From The Enemy. It depicts that moment when the darkness has broken and that Light begins to descend upon Joseph. In that moment, Joseph came to know a few things, among them: God and Jesus are real and they will keep Their promises, in this case, quite spectacularly—he, Joseph, lacked wisdom, he asked of God, and God answered.

Light Descending—Delivered From The Enemy, Chemigram, 2025

To provide a little behind-the-scenes information, earlier this month I wrote about showing one’s work, and included a photo of a sketch, a video, and a picture of the conceptualization of what would become this piece, and will be a foundational part of other works I have in mind. I mentioned that I was at the very beginning of a new body of work, or a new direction I feel I need to take, and was fairly evasive about adding any additional info. Today I feel like I can pull the curtains back and more or less announce just what I’m up to.

As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I’ve felt a desire to create artwork that expresses my faith and beliefs, but haven’t known just how to go about it, being a photographer who really only works in the landscape. I had a few ideas, which I still plan to hash out and try to execute, but I don’t know how deep that particular well is. During the Christmas holiday, I had a storm of Inspiration: lumens and chemigrams would make excellent media for me to work with, and recorded all (I think I got them all) of my thoughts in my notebook(s): what topics or concepts to portray, what some of these images might look like (hence the sketch from the afore-mentioned blog post). Where I’ve settled, is a body, or bodies of work, largely devotional in nature, treating scripture, doctrinal ideas, and events from scripture and the early days of the Church. I’m cautiously excited about the whole thing. I say cautiously, because of the importance of these topics and events to me personally, as well as to millions of members of the Church, past, present, and future.

When I made Light Descending—Delivered From The Enemy, I sat down to just make a few “practice” pieces. This, and those “sketches” I made before and after, are chemigrams, and I began with the intent to expand on the conceptual sketch I had made, but I started swirling the chemicals and dripping them in a spiral on the paper. A fun part of making chemigrams (and I say the same of Lumens) is that they are highly unpredictable, serendipitous, and completely unrepeatable. This piece is all of that. What I set out to make was not at all what I ended up with. I didn’t know that I would end up with an image that I could call “complete” when I sat down that day. But that is what happened, and I’m really quite pleased with the image.

When I was adjusting and touching up the digitized image the other night, I had Jonah on my lap. He pointed to the bright swirl in the center and asked, not knowing anything about the image, “is that God?” As Jonah did, I hope you also see God in this image and feel Him in your life.

Tommy Guerrero

In one of the semesters of my junior year of college, I had to take a graphic design course as part of my core art curriculum. We had an adjunct instructor that semester (I’ve forgotten her name since then) that would often put on music after her demos while we worked on whatever assignment that was given. One day she put on an album—it’s the only one I remember—that was an instant hit. That album was A Little Bit of Somethin’ by Tommy Guerrero. I’d never heard of him before, but I loved his fusion of Jazz and Funk. It was the perfect music to groove out to, and it still is for me. I remember walking down to (I think) Sam Goody that day and buying the CD, but it was one they didn’t have in the store, so they had to order it in. Once it came, I listened to it non-stop. Every song was a “banger.”

Despite my obsession with that album then and for just over two decades since, I never did go in search of more of his albums. I never even looked to see if he had any others. I purposefully kept myself ignorant. A Little Bit of Somethin’ had so effectively knocked it out of the park for me that I didn’t think anything else by Guerrero, if he had anything (spoiler: he did have more and would release more albums in my years of self-imposed ignorance), could be as good. I know. It sounds rather dumb to not want to listen to more music by a certain artist, view more photographs by a certain photographer, paintings by a certain painter, read more poems by a certain poet, view more ballets by a certain dance company or choreographer because the one singular experience with that artist was so good that you would deny yourself any other experiences with them. But that was the state I kept myself in until a few months ago when I decided it was time to branch out, and added two more albums to my library. It was true that neither quite met the mark of A Little Bit of Somethin’, they were still really good albums. They were still just as suitable to groove out to while developing film, or working in Photoshop or Lightroom, or preparing carbon tissue and prints.

So a couple weeks ago I got the rest of his oeuvre (thank goodness for an Apple Music subscription), and I still regard that first album as the best, but I still thoroughly enjoy every single album—all thirteen of them.

On the one hand, I feel like I needlessly deprived myself of so much really good music. On the other, maybe I needed to deprive myself in order to really appreciate the rest of what Tommy has made in his career. At least that’s what I’ll tell myself now to make myself feel better about my delusional choice.

It would only be appropriate to include some music in a post about music, so here are some of my favorite Tommy Guerrero songs, and I’m restricting myself to just 2 off of A Little Bit of Somethin’.

On Favorite Music

I hadn’t intended on publishing this post this soon, and so close to the heels of my last post, but I feel like this one needs to be published sooner than later. It’ll provide a good foundation for my next coming post to be published on Friday, and many more posts throughout the year/years. It’s a long one, but I hope it’ll be worth your time.

Favorite Artist(s)

Ever since the Fall of 2007 when I first heard them, the Avett Brothers have been my favorite group. It was an instant and immediate promotion, knocking out of contention Led Zeppelin, The Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, Interpol, Death Cab for Cutie, OK Go, Wilco, and Snow Patrol for that top slot. I still remember sitting at the job site in Wolf Creek above Heber in the passenger seat of Sean’s Isuzu Rodeo. Four Thieves Gone had just come out, which didn’t mean much to me at the time, since they were then totally unknown to me. He played the first track, “Talk On Indolence,” and I’ll never forget the rush hearing Scott machine gun those opening lyrics. I don’t remember any other song that got me so amped up in that way, before or after. Rage Against the Machine and Tool are probably the closest comparison, but the emotions they stirred up were from a more angsty and angry and defiant place. “Talk On Indolence” was a much happier and jubilantly rowdy sound. Brandi Carlile can really give me chills with the emotion in her voice in some songs, “The Story” being the one that gets me most, both in degree and in frequency.

It's now been a little over 17 years since that day (I don’t remember exactly which day, though my last.fm profile shows me that I first listened to them on my iPod or iTunes on September 2), and for that duration of time, the Avett Brothers have been my number one favorite band. Or, nearly that long.

Going further back in my musical history, I was introduced to Iron & Wine during the 2002/2003 school year of college. I can’t say he (Sam Beam) was at the top of my list of favorites. He was possibly in my top 10, but not in my top 5. Even still, he was always a constant in my musical rotation, and continues to be today. In 2011, when Kiss Each Other Clean was released, he was more prominent, especially the song “Half Moon.” That song still really makes me happy. It happened again in 2013 with the release of Ghost on Ghost, and two songs were on repeat a lot afterwards: “Caught in the Briars,” and “The Dessert Babbler.” Love Letter for Fire, a collaboration with Jesca Hoop came out in 2016, and I couldn’t stop listening to “The Lamb You Lost” and “Every Songbird Says.” Beast Epic came out in 2017, and while no specific songs really stood out, the album, as a whole, was, and is fantastic.

But the Avett Brothers were also putting out phenomenal albums and EPs: The Carpenter came out in 2012, and I saw them live for that album’s tour in Salt Lake. Then Magpie and the Dandelion came out in 2013, and I saw them in Seattle. True Sadness came out in 2016, and soon supplanted Emotionalism as my favorite Avetts album, while “Talk on Indolence” remained my favorite Avetts song and my favorite song period.

After 2016, both bands slowed down with their album releases, especially with the Avett Brothers. Iron & Wine put out another collaborative album with Calexico in 2019 but didn’t put out a solo album until May of last year, Light Verse, which is really good. The Avetts put out Closer Than Together in 2019, and only a few songs really hooked me, and then they too were silent until May of last year when they released a self-titled album, which, like the previous, only had a few hooking songs. The Iron & Wine album and the Avetts album were released only a few weeks apart and a feeling I’d been having increasingly since the middle of 2023 began to crystalize into something I could define: my love for the Avetts was slowly waning, and that for Iron & Wine was growing fast.

I started to really give in to introspection: who was really my favorite artist? I thought the Avetts would forever be my favorites. But I was connecting more often and more deeply with Iron & Wine lately. Was it too early; had too little time passed for me to really let another group dethrone the Avett Brothers? Was I making a hasty decision? It was an immediate thing for the Avetts to dethrone Led Zeppelin, why wouldn’t this gradual shift be just as legitimate, just as honest, just as true? Maybe even more so? If Iron & Wine really was my new favorite, who was Number 2? Would the Avetts, by default, occupy that slot? Or do they fall farther than just one position? If they fell more than one, who moves up? And, what, in the first place, is the criteria that makes a group my favorite? What makes a Number 1? 2? 3, etc.? As I write this, I acknowledge that I never really defined those criteria. I sat down and looked at all of the artists in my Apple Music library, along with all the artists listed in my last.fm profile, made a list of my 100 most-played artists plus a few others that go deep into my past—favorite bands from high school—so they could all present their case, to use a courtroom as an analogy. Just going off of instinct, I re-structured my top 10 favorite artists. I came to the conclusion that yes, Iron & Wine is now my favorite artist. So I can say my top ten artists stand as follows:

  1. Iron & Wine

  2. The Avett Brothers

  3. Elliott Smith

  4. Interpol

  5. Death Cab for Cutie

  6. Wilco

  7. Secret Machines

  8. Cat Power

  9. Smashing Pumpkins

  10. Grizzly Bear

Spots 3-20 or 25 might be a little fluid, but I think this order might stand for a good while.

I suppose at this time I should try to define what makes a favorite, to put into words what some of those intuitive thoughts and feelings were telling me, how they were guiding me:

  • How long have I known this artist? How long have they been a part of my life?

  • How much of a part of my life have they been? Has it just been a casual relationship, or one I’ve turned to often?

  • Does frequency of listens really matter? What was the intent behind listening?

  • How much history do I share with that artist?

  • Do I have any deep and significant memories associated with that artist? What are those memories, and what makes them significant?

  • How big is this artist’s oeuvre? Does a large or small body of work have a significant influence of their position on my list?

There may be more questions I considered that I either don’t remember or can’t quite articulate still, but this gives a good picture of what was going through my mind and has been going through my mind for at least five or six months, if not longer. And it’s because of this list of questions that it’s so hard to really pin down a definitive top 10 or 25 list of my favorite artists as far as who belongs on it, and which position they occupy.

Favorite Song(s)

Amid this “Who is my favorite artist” “crisis,” I’ve also been pondering what is my favorite song? Is it sill “Talk on Indolence?” That too has also been dethroned this year. Before all this thinking on who my favorite artist was, and then what my favorite song was, I don’t know that I had a definitive list of favorite songs. I only knew that “Talk On Indolence” was my favorite and then a lot of others all contending for various positions, such as “Hard Sun” by Eddie Vedder, “Half Moon” and “The Dessert Babbler” by Iron & Wine, “Farewell Transmission” by Songs: Ohia, “The New” by Interpol, “Transatlanticism” by Death Cab for Cutie. So along with compiling a list of my favorite artists, I’ve tried to put together a list of my favorite songs of all time, and, like the artists list, will surely be a fluid thing, but as it stands now, this is what I have:

  1. “Willie,” by Cat Power

  2. “Half Moon,” by Iron & Wine

  3. “The Dessert Babbler,” by Iron & Wine

  4. “Two Weeks,” by Grizzly Bear

  5. “Hard Sun,” by Eddie Vedder

  6. “Ain’t No Man,” by The Avett Brothers

  7. “The New,” by Interpol

  8. “Transatlanticism,” by Death Cab for Cutie

  9. “I’m the Man Who Loves You,” by Wilco

  10. “When the Stars Go Blue,” by Ryan Adams

 

Do you see what is not on the list? Do you see how far down that list is the artist that was once my favorite of all time? To say it was a struggle to come up with this list and to realize that “Talk On Indolence” wouldn’t make the cut would be like saying the ocean is damp. Among the considerations listed above regarding what constitutes a favorite, was what message the song carried, and what emotions were stirred up. I also had to take into consideration melodies, harmonies, tunes, instrumentation, vocals, lyricality (a song can have a good message or meaning, but told through or with poorly written lyrics). In all this contemplation, I’d realized that “Talk On Indolence” needed to make way for other Avetts songs to rise to the top, as far as what the song means to me. That song is my most played ever: I’ve listened to it over 500 times, as shown by my last.fm data to date. But again, does play count alone rank my favorites? The answer, if you haven’t deduced by now, is a resounding “no!”

Around April I played “Willie” by Cat Power. Actually, I played that whole album, The Greatest. When I came across that album in 2007 (it came out in 2006), I played it on repeat several times a day. It was like a soothing balm to my soul in the chaos and rough day-to-day pace of framing houses. “Willie” was/is such a great song: the story of two lovers who couldn’t be separated, beautiful lyrics sung beautifully by Chan Marshal’s soft, yet strong voice, the wonderful saxophone guiding the melody along. But over the past 10 years or so, that album wasn’t a regular feature in my musical choices or rotation, so when I really listened to it in April, a flood of memories came back, and those same feelings of calm and tranquility washed over me. It only took a few listens to realize that that song belonged in the top spot, and should have remained there the whole time. Now married, and with two boys, it just touched my soul: I love Gina with my whole self, and Tommy and Jonah too, and that song stirred up all the feelings of love and joy that I have for them. It’s not the number one song I turn to when I’m pining for her—that song is “Islands in the Stream” covered by Feist and Constantines. But “Willie” is now firmly at the top of the list of favorites, then the two by Iron & Wine are equally firm in their respective positions. At least for now. As I’ve said, these things are fluid, and life changes the more it goes on, and who knows what song or songs will have a profound impact on my in a year or 10?

New All Songs Playlist

And now the final topic. I’ve listened to the All Songs Considered podcast from NPR since late 2005 or early 2006, I’m not totally sure. But ever since then, I’ve kept and curated a playlist of the songs I’ve added to my library that were discovered through and because of that podcast. It was (I know I’m spoiling things a bit by using the past tense here) 18 or 19 years old, and I don’t know how many songs had been added to it. That playlist was a representation of all of my discoveries and my separation from mainstream record labels, and artists: pretty much all the stuff you hear on top 40 radio stations over and over. So when that playlist somehow got inadvertently deleted in August last year, I was devastated. And frustrated. All of that history was gone. So many lone songs in my music library were now orphaned. I knew many of the songs that were in that playlist, but there were so many more that I rarely ever played unless I listened to that playlist, but still really enjoyed listening to. Luckily I had duplicated part of that playlist on Spotify, but that only spanned about 4 years of those musical discoveries. I still have no idea how that playlist got deleted. I had been updating it and adding some new songs to it, and when I went to add a song after having added a few songs to it, it was gone.

I mourned the loss for a few days (not to sound overly dramatic), wondering how to proceed. Do I reconstruct it? How? Do I just make a new one and it would only have the songs I’d discovered since the creation of this new one? I decided on reconstruction. I knew that the podcast has had an accompanying blog since it’s inception, so, along with the partially duplicated Spotify playlist, I went as far back as I remembered listening to that podcast—in reality, I’m sure I went back a little earlier—and made a spreadsheet to which I added every artist and song that seemed remotely familiar. Then, using that spreadsheet, I’ve been able to cross reference songs that are in my library and reconstruct the playlist. But I learned very early on in the process that songs would be in this new playlist that hadn’t been in the first incarnation, or even my library, originally, and I had to accept that this new one would not be as organic as the previous one. There are songs in this new playlist by artists I came to know and enjoy at a later point in their career that I had not added to my library and original playlist. There are songs from my high school years, classic rock songs, that I didn’t add to the original playlist because they were not “discoveries” but now exist in this new one. Both of those statements show that now this new playlist is a much more accurate representation or cross section of my overall musical tastes, and therefor I’m much more excited about this playlist than I was at the beginning. I don’t know if I can say that I’m more excited about this playlist than the old one, but I’m excited about it.

You can scroll through and/or listen to the first 100 songs on the playlist below. At the time of publishing this post, the playlist as a whole sits at 1051 songs, and I’m adding to it regularly.

 

I’ve written about music here before, perhaps not as much as I could have, but certainly not as much I should have. Music is such a big part of my life and it informs my creativity so much that I really have no shortage of material there for writing about my thoughts and feelings about creativity, about what sparks such deep emotion in a song or album. What memories are stirred up, what lyric touched me in some way, how that song or artist informs my photography or life in general. So follow along for my humble thoughts, opinions and reactions on and to all that has been discussed.

Daily Walks

In mid-October 2023, Gina and I signed up for a health challenge that required us to exercise for a certain amount of time every day. I work a 4-10 schedule, with my workday starting at 5:30 a.m. The drive to and from work takes a little over 30 minutes. Usually, I work three 11-hour days, from 5 a.m. to 4 p.m., and then I’m off at noon on Thursdays.

It didn’t take long to realize that trying to fit the full 45 minutes of exercise into the evening, while also spending time with Gina and the boys, was going to be pretty difficult. Being an early riser, I decided to set my alarm 30 minutes earlier than usual and take a 20-ish-minute walk every morning before leaving for work.

Some people think I’m crazy—that waking up around 3:30 a.m. to go for a walk is a rather horrific idea—but I’ve really come to treasure those walks. At first, they were just about exercise. Then I restarted playing Pokémon Go and spent much of the time trying to “catch ’em all.”

But one particular morning made me close the app and open my camera. It was November 15, and the moon was low in the western sky, shining brightly through wispy clouds. I had to stop and take a quick picture.

And then I had to take another photo a few dozen yards down the street.

And then another a few blocks further on.

Just for fun, after I returned home, I decided to post the three images to Instagram.

I repeated this the next morning, and the next, and the next. It seemed like a great way to work my “creative muscles,” especially since I find it hard to get out and photograph as often as I’d like.

If you follow me on Instagram and have seen these posts, you’ve probably noticed a pattern: I always share three images, except for one post where I accidentally included a fourth. That first morning, I took only three pictures. The next day, I took more, but since I had shared just three images the first day, I decided to stick with that number. By the third day, it felt like a fun approach, and it became a tradition.

This process has been a great way to think curatorially—to edit and select which images to include. While I don’t claim to be great at it, this practice is giving another set of “creative muscles” some attention.

My walks have become so much more than just walks. They’ve become a way for me to truly get to know my neighborhood. Where I once simply knew the streets, I’m now noticing homes, trees, and yards. What started as hasty records has grown into something more meaningful. The images I capture now feel like part of a larger story, and I’m beginning to contemplate how they might fit into a grander, more deliberate body of work.

I don’t have any concrete conclusions yet, but I’m having a lot of fun making these images. On that note, I thought I’d share some of the photos I’ve made over the last few months.

Show Your Work!

I just finished a book by the same title of this blog post, and it’s because of that book that I’m writing this blog post, and why I’ll be posting some of things I post in the future.

In my last post I mentioned some possible reasons why I had gone more than a year without publishing anything. I think a the root of it was knowing where a blog would fit in the world—my world—of social media. Basically, what is the point of me keeping a blog in 2024?

For me, one of the virtues of keeping a blog, is that there’s no algorithm to contend with or to try to understand or manipulate or be manipulated by. Another virtue is that the content is mine. At least I think it is…This website and blog are hosted by Squarespace, so I don’t know if there is anything in the Terms and Conditions that would permit them license to do anything with my content, the way we see Instagram and other social networks try to claim which then sends the internet in an uproar for a few days.

A big drawback for me, is that it isn’t a passively accessed or delivered system. By going on Instagram or Threads or whatever is the new social network du jour, audiences have a one-stop-shopping place. A blog is something to which an audience member has to deliberately navigate.

Despite all that, there are things that I can’t easily do on social media, or at least things I don’t want to do on social media. For example, I feel like adding a lot of text is cumbersome in social media posts. What to do in the main feed vs. stories vs. reels causes more confusion and stress than I want to put up with. Which brings me back to the book Show Your Work. The author, Austin Kleon, urges readers to share everything. And while social media does make it easy to do just that, I still feel like my blog is a better place for that.

Anyway, I’ll stop pontificating and get on with the point of this post, which is to share something I’ve begun working on. I don’t know if I’m quite ready to divulge what this work is about, but I at least want to share the progression of this and other bodies of work that I have in process. Also to share (vaguely) some background as to why this work is being made: I’ve felt a compulsion to make a certain type of work, work that deals with a very large part of my life and who I am. Over the Christmas Holiday, I had the time and mind-set to be open to inspiration. There was one particular image that began to coagulate in my mind, so I decided to set some graphite to paper to help me visualize what I want to make with photo paper and chemicals, and quickly sketched this:

When I say I’ll be using photo paper and chemicals, I’m referrring to chemigrams, a process of brushing, dripping, or spraying developer and fixer and other household chemicals on photo paper which all interact with the light-sensitive emulsion in their own unique ways.

As I haven’t done any wet darkroom output with silver gelatin materials in about a decade and a half, I didn’t have any paper developer to begin working on some images, so I had to order some and wait for it to arrive (it arrived 2 days ago) to finally do so.

Last night, with all the materials I’d need to get started, I made my “first draft:”

At this point, I’m largely just getting to know my materials and tools. I’m not expecting anything amazing yet. What I do expect is to learn and play and experiment. Soon enough, I’ll be making things that I’m truly pleased with.

So This is the New Year

Sorry for the Death Cab for Cutie quote, but I couldn’t resist. If you look at the date of my last post, it’s been more than a year since I’ve published anything here. I don’t have any good reason for it. Maybe I felt like there wasn’t anything worth blogging about. Or maybe it’s just because writing a blog post is too laborious, and I didn’t want to peel my eyes off of whatever game I may have been playing on my phone, or stopped myself from doom scrolling for a few minutes and just write a blog post.

That’s hopefully going to change in 2025. My intent on this, the 3rd day of January, 2025, is to publish more often. Should I commit to posting weekly? I think I should.

My other intentions, or resolutions, if we want to use the word that’s thrown around at the beginning of every new year, are, in regards to the relevancy of this website and this blog:

  • Read at least 12 books

  • Begin a new chapter of my Parks Project (more on this in its own blog post)

  • Become more “fluent” in the cyanotype and carbon processes

  • Print more photographs (those captured digitally)

  • Sketch more

  • Paint more

  • Completely revamp my website

Looking back on 2024 and the work I made, despite not being great in quantity, and the quality could be debated, I feel pretty good about things. And looking ahead for 2025, I’m quite excited by the potential that lies ahead of me.

So come along on the journey of 2025 with me. Hopefully we both gain something from it.

Happy New Year!

Restored Passion

Photography was something I really enjoyed doing. Now, before you think I’ve lost the enjoyment of it and am calling it quits, keep reading. My path to dedicating so, so many hours of my life to this mashup of Art and Science started as an adolescent, watching my dad and both grandfathers taking pictures with their SLRs on the many vacations we took together. One grandfather in particular got what was then a quite nice camera: a Nikon N6006. It was the first time I’d seen an autofocus camera and was amazed that a camera could do such a thing all by itself. Around that time, my grandmother gifted me a basic point-and-shoot camera for Christmas. A few years later, in high school, I took my first photography class and soon got brought on to the yearbook staff. I had such fun recording scenes out in the world on film and then coming back into the darkroom and processing that film. Making prints from those negatives and watching an image gradually form on a blank piece of paper added to the magic. Later, at the end of my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I was working with my Mission President in applying to college at the brand-new Brigham Young University-Idaho, my choice of major was either Photography or another subject I thoroughly enjoyed, American History. In a figurative coin-toss, I went with Photography. At the time, landscape photography wasn’t really on my radar, as far as career plans were concerned, having been involved with the yearbook staff in high school. I enjoyed taking landscape photographs, had taken a lot during high school, but I figured I’d end up in photo journalism, or find work at a mountain bike or BMX bike magazine to put bread on the table (Little did I know then just what those industries would look like even a mere decade later).

The fun and amazement continued to grow, fostered by an excellent professor/instructor/mentor/friend Darren Clark. During my first semester the plan was to pursue the journalism or magazine path, but seeing the amazing landscape work Darren was doing, getting more immersed in the work of Ansel Adams than I had been previous, as well as the work of Edward Weston, and John Sexton during that early part of my education, and then making more and more landscape photographs of my own, my career ideas and plans started shifting.

We learned the Zone System during my second semester, while still working with my Nikon N90s, which I got during my senior year of high school, and which I still own (I’ll never ever get rid of that fantastic camera). The control that the Zone System makes possible oopened up a whole new dimension to me, adding more excitement and satisfaction in making consistent negatives, allowing for making easier prints.

And then I was introduced to the View Camera (my memory is a little hazy, but I think it may have also been during my second semester), after having only worked with the 35mm format. If the control of the Zone System sparked a flame, then learning about and how to use the view camera was like pouring several tanker trucks worth of gasoline on a wildfire. That was when photography went from a thing I really, really enjoyed to being a passion. An obsession. I loved  viewing the world upside-down and inverted on the ground glass. I enjoyed the slow and deliberate nature of the process. I loved the huge negatives. I soon bought a Graflex Crown Graphic 4x5, a Nikkor 90mm SW f/4.5 and some film holders. It didn’t have the movements of the monorail camera owned by the school that I learned on, but I didn’t need them for the kind of work I was doing and still do. Not long after that, I found and purchased a Kodak Improved Century View No. 2 5x7 on eBay. It cost $120, including shipping; the previous owner said one of the gears to adjust the focus was broken, but I never had any issues with it. I think one of the knobs that locked things down was just a little too tight. That format became my favorite: I just love the elongated rectangle. The 4x5 format has always felt a little too square-ish to me for my own work, though there has been the rare photograph that feels better having a tighter frame. Another “pro” for my 5x7 argument is that that size negative produces wonderful, intimate contact prints, a strong motivator in my wanting to learn the carbon printing process.

That old Kodak (I traced the serial number to a manufacture date of 1905) became my main camera, using the Graflex as my backup, or the camera I would bring on longer hikes or backpacking trips where I didn’t particularly want to take the 5x7, though the 5x7 accompanied me on a few trips deep in the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park. I took it everywhere; it was never left home no matter where I went, as is the case with any camera of just about every photographer out there.

Early in 2008 I was able to use a Nikon D300—then one of Nikon’s newest prosumer digital bodies, borrowed from another good friend, Jon Long. I was impressed with how well that camera performed, and around June of that year I purchased one of my own. A few weeks later I moved down to Logan, Utah ahead of starting grad school at Utah State University. Despite no access to dedicated darkroom facilities between graduating at BYU-I in 2005 and starting grad school in 2008, I made the bathrooms of the apartments I lived in work to process the sheets of film I exposed. But during that first (and only) year of grad school, my use of the digital camera really increased to the point that my use of the view camera all but ceased. The ease and convenience of the digital camera was just too alluring!

During the summer of 2009, I came to the incredibly hard decision to discontinue my graduate studies, which meant I was once again without access to a dedicated darkroom to process film. Since I had pretty much transitioned completely over to digital, I decided to sell off all of my large format equipment. I pretty much never regretted selling the 4x5, and still don’t really regret it to this day, but I didn’t make it a week after selling the 5x7 before I was filled with regret, even though I didn’t have an easy way of processing the film in the house I was living in at the time.

I continued to photograph, despite being filled with regret of having sold the 5x7. I felt like I’d evicted a part of my very being, part of my photographic make-up, even though I hadn’t made much work with it at all over the previous year. Around 2014, now living in a different place, I found and purchased another 5x7, along with a lens and film holders, made a few exposures, processed the film in the cramped bathroom—I haven’t yet mentioned that I was processing in open trays, and so had to be in complete darkness—and decided I didn’t want to put up with that and sold it all off again. I had a little less regret that time, but it was still there. Then in 2016 I did the same: bought a whole new kit, made some photographs, processed the negatives, decided processing film in trays hunched over the side of a bath tub was too big a pain, and sold it off again.

Meanwhile, over the years, I lost the same passion I had for photography. It wasn’t something I was conscious of, and it’s only been within the last five or six months that I’ve come to realize that it had happened at all. It’s true that I went through phases of greater and lesser productivity—my Lightroom catalog shows a fairly large dearth of images made in 2014—and I made work I’m quite happy with and proud of. It’s true that I still got a great amount of satisfaction and joy out of practicing photography almost exclusively digitally.

Starting in the late fall/early winter of last year, I began collecting parts of Eastman Kodak 2-D 5x7 cameras, finding pieces for sale on eBay here and there, and by February of this year I had my final piece to make a complete camera, as well as a lens (a Schneider Super Angulon 120mm f/8) and half a dozen film holders. I then spent two weeks disassembling everything, stripping and sanding the wood of it’s old finish and stain and applying a new stain and finish, and polishing the brass. Since then, that restored camera has been my main way of making images, not including my iPhone. It’s been during that time that I’ve felt an excitement for photographing that I haven’t felt for so long. Like I said earlier, that’s not to say that I haven’t experienced excitement and joy about new concepts and techniques I’ve delved into over the last decade or so—I have. But using the large format has resurrected the highest excitement for the art and craft that I had between 2003 and 2009. It’s been so good to have that kind of structure to the act of photographing again. And owning our own house, and having some decent options for daylight processing mean that many of the frustrations of not having a dedicated darkroom are gone.

I may not be as prolific an image maker right now as I was fifteen years ago—being a husband and the father of two young boys are greater priorities, speaking qualitatively, not quantitatively, though the three of them do demand and deserve all the time I can give them. Finding the balance between Home Life, Work Life, fulfilling my church calling, and spending time in my other hobbies and interests is no easy thing. Thankfully some of those things can all blend together. At any rate, the 5x7 camera is back in my life, and all is right in my little photographic world.

What I’m listening to—Podcast edition, Vol. 1

Podcasts have been a staple in my listening/entertaining/learning habits since This Week in Tech and Diggnation started in 2005. The former continues on, but the latter ended in 2011. I’m no longer a faithful listener of TWiT—I’ll listen to an episode if the show notes list anything particularly interesting to me—but as podcasts have been such a prominent thing in my life for so long, I thought I’d create a series of blog posts listing the various podcasts I listen to. Some are still going, while others have gone dead but episodes still remain online to listen to. So with that, here’s Volume 1:

First, what may be the longest-running photography podcast: LensWork—Photography and the Creative Process, by Brooks Jensen. Brooks puts out a daily “Here’s a Thought” episode, usually 3-5 minutes long where he briefly shares thoughts on some aspect of photography, and a weekly longer-form episode, where he goes a bit more in depth on a photography-related topic. Those topics range from wish-list features for new cameras, to philosophical ideas, to dealing with challenges a creative person might encounter. As of the time of writing this post, the long-form LensWork episodes number over 1300, and the “Here’s a Thought” episodes number over 1400, so if you’ve not yet listened to this podcast and are the type to listen to the backlog of a new subscription, you’ll have plenty to binge.

Up next is On Taking Pictures, by Bill Wadman and Jeffery Saddoris. OTP began in May of 2012, then ended 325 episodes later in July of 2018, and for those 6 years, Bill and Jeffery had some truly great and inspiring conversations. Despite the title, this was not really about just photography, but about life, relationships, mental health, art in general, and so much more. The conversations these two had were really on a level with being in a graduate class. Those still subscribed to this podcast got a surprise in October of 2018 when the two decided to roll tape on their discussion after Apple announced new hardware, and then the feed lay dormant, seemingly done for good, until January of this year, when we got another big surprise and found a new episode they’d recorded, followed by another two episodes since then. This one is well worth going through the whole backlog.

After On Taking Pictures ended, Jeffery continued recording podcasts, under three subtitles/topics: Process Driven, conversations with artists of various disciplines, Iterations, along the vein of Jensen’s “Here’s a Thought” episodes, and lastly, Deep Natter, conversations with a different set of artists, most often Sean Tucker, on the more philosophical side of living a creative life. And like OTP, these conversations are about photography, but not really about just photography. Photography becomes a metaphor for living a more fuller life, and the challenges of life become metaphors for dealing with creative and photographic challenges. You can find the three podcasts in Jeffery’s Everything feed.


About 10 years ago, Phil Monahan of Orvis shared a video in his Friday Fly Fishing Film Tour blog post he put out every week. This video featured a fly fishing guide by the name of Hank Patterson. The video was full of the worst advice and instruction a fly fisherman could ever put to use, and the humor and sarcasm coming from him was lost on so many people who viewed the video. But it was so over the top that I’m still amazed anyone ever took him seriously. Flash forward to 2019, and Hank started up a podcast titled Hank Patterson’s Outdoor MisAdventures. If you’re a lover of the outdoors, give this one a listen. Hank is sometimes joined by his very indoorsy friend, Kevin, where they talk about basically how to not do the outdoors. There’s never a dull moment listening to Hank.


And lastly, a podcast called The Wild with Chris Morgan. Each week, Morgan tells a new story of wildlife, and the ecosystems they inhabit to educate and bring awareness to listeners of issues our planet is facing.

What podcasts are you listening to? Share in the comments!

Dream features

Every once in a while I ponder what my dream features I would love to see manufacturers build into their cameras or lenses, and I have a few that are right at the top of my list, and have been for the better part of a decade:

 

First, I would love to see live exposure view. We saw this in the iPhone 12, and now the 13 (I’m sure the feature exists in the Android platform, but I’m an Apple guy). During night photography or long-exposure photography, it would be nice to see a live view of the exposure build as it gathers light during the time the shutter is open. Sort of the way one sees the image magically appear on a sheet of photo paper in the wet darkroom. That way, you could start the exposure, and end it once you’re satisfied with the image. I know it could cause some pretty massive battery drain, but many cameras can accommodate a battery grip, or even an external power supply, so that hurdle could be cleared pretty easily.

 

Second, and this one is a technological biggie: the ability for the camera to shut off individual pixels after it reaches a defined exposure point. To explain: using Photoshop as an example, the brightness of a pixel has a value on a scale of 0-255, 0 being the blackest black, and 255 being the whitest white, and no visual information is contained at either extreme. With this feature, you could tell the camera to limit each individual pixel to gain no more than a set amount of brightness on that scale, say, 245-250, where you’ll still get bright highlights, but won’t completely lose information or detail. If any of you are familiar with the Zone System, this would be akin to placing our highlights on Zone 8.5-9. Like I said, this one would be a biggie, because it may make the camera comically large with all the added transistors and diodes and any other electrical components that would be needed for allowing the control of millions of pixels, but it’s one I dream of.

 

And thirdly, and perhaps the one I want the most, would be to invert the image on the LCD in live view. I spent many years looking at the ground glass of a large format camera. When using a large format camera, the image of the scene being photographed is projected through the lens onto a piece of glass that has been frosted, so it has some opacity. This projected images is upside down and backwards, that is, what is up is down, what is down is up, and things on the right end up on the left side of the glass, and things on the left end up on the right side of the glass. It’s the way every single lens ever made works. Even your own eye sees the world this way, your brain just flips everything to the way we see. So it is with the SLR, DSLR and mirrorless cameras (and some medium format cameras, but we’ll not bring those into the present discussion). In the case of the SLR and DSLR, there is a prism that bounces the image around until we see the image “correctly” in the viewfinder. I found that viewing the world upside down and backwards was an incredibly helpful tool in composition. It drew your eye to shapes and spatial relationships, and revealed value (shades of dark and light) in ways that you don’t get by viewing the world the way we already see it. In today’s digital cameras, meaning mirrorless cameras, the optical “correction” is written into the software/firmware of the camera. It would only be a matter of adding a menu option to let you invert the image. Something that could even be added to previous generations of cameras via a new software update.

 

Do any of you have dream features you wish camera/lens manufacturers would add to their products?

Tommy, The Photographer

Tommy periodically comes to me or Gina and asks for our phones to take pictures, and watching him photograph has been very refreshing and educational. Yes, the man with the BFA is learning something from a child who’s only in pre-school. I’ve been making photographs of him, and now his younger brother, exploring my curiosity of how a child sees the world. Handing the camera over to him has shown me literally just that. It’s also been a good lesson to re-learn as a photographer watching him explore angles, assemble an image, work through a design and composition, get low, or close, with no preconception of what is and isn’t a good photograph. He just plays and tries new things. It’s something that I need to do more.

Enjoy a selection of images made by Thomas:

Fire Rings

Over the past 13 or so years I’ve had a mild fixation on fire rings. I’ve always been drawn to the way humans interact with and alter their environment, be it for survival (benevolent, maybe necessary, and well-intentioned regardless of location, or heeding Leave No Trace principles), recreation (may or may not be benevolent, most likely unnecessary, may or may not adhere to Leave No Trace principles), or vandalism (malicious, and wholly unnecessary), and fire rings are features in the landscape that can fit any of the three categories. I’ve mainly gravitated to those fire rings that are on public lands in dispersed camping designated areas, as opposed to those in campgrounds run either by the State or a private campground, I think really because they highlight some inner, or perhaps ancient or primal need, desire, or instinct we have for fire.

Temple Fork Canyon, Utah

I don’t know if all of these photographs will end up as anything; sometimes it feels like it’s a bit of a one-trick pony: if you’ve seen one fire pit you’ve seen them all. But also, I’ve sometimes been surprised, and even a little dumfounded by where people have decided to make a fire. And, in the era of Covid, and having passed through two summers of increased use of our public lands, I’ve been disgusted and appalled by what and how much people have left behind in fire pits, either charred or even melted remnants of the fire there, or whole bags of unburned garbage. And in all of that, I feel like a whole body of work could materialize; I just need to spend some time looking at all the images I’ve made, and make even more. But for now, enjoy a few of my favorites I’ve made over the years.

Left Hand Fork Canyon, Utah

Illegal Fire Ring, Bear Lake, Utah

Franklin Basin, Utah

Willow Creek, Idaho

Along Laketown Road, Utah

Franklin Basin, Utah

Willard Peak Road, Utah

Franklin Basin, Utah

Unusual Lens

Several years ago now a retired co-worker came into my office with a giant lens, not like any I’d ever seen before. He handed it to me and explained it was an old TV camera lens. He asked if I wanted it, and despite not having any way of using it, I knew I had to have it, so I accepted his offer.

The lens, a Schneider Varigon 17-170mm from the 1960’s, sat on my shelf for while. I thought that I might use it for some Franken-camera made out of a cardboard box or something, but I told one of my brothers, who has a 3D printer, about it, and he started designing an adapter to mount it to my DSLR.

Once he got it done, the lens still sat for months. I knew before the adapter got finished that there was no way it could cover a full frame camera, as it was made for 16mm film, so I knew there would be vignetting. I also didn’t know (still don’t) the distance it needed in order for it to focus properly, so I had no idea what to really expect. When I got the lens in my hand and mounted it to my camera, it was a very pleasant surprise. There was heavy vignetting, especially at when the lens is zoomed any wider than about 150 mm, and if the exposure was set bright enough, some of the internals of the lens can be seen. I soon found that there’s a very narrow window in which things come into focus. Of course with a lens that old, predating any kind of dream about digital photography technology and what it would be capable of, the coatings on the glass are virtually nonexistent, and so the lens flares like crazy, and the sensor on my Nikon Z7 vastly out-resolves the resolution of the glass.

I brought the lens out with me on a few outings after I got the adapter, but nothing I was doing then really jived with the limitations that new piece of gear presented, and so I felt rather uninspired in what to do with it.

But then we bought our house, and as I spent hour after hour working there, and walking through the back yard with all the Ivy and Yucca and Roses and Virginia Creeper and grape vines, I knew that when I was done with all the renovations and had time to get the camera out again, that this lens would be exactly the tool to use to get to know our property.

I’ve had the lens out a few times in the past few weeks, and it’s been pretty fun to look at the backyard through that lens, literally, and metaphorically. That yard is so rich with vegetation that between the lens-based work I can mine from it and the lumens I have in mind to begin, I think I’ll never exhaust this place of its photographic potential.

Transitions

Back in March we saw a house for sale in Providence, and after a showing with our realtor, we decided to put an offer on it. We knew the offer wasn’t super strong, but still hoped to get the house. We didn’t know at the time that we would lose that offer, and go on to make and lose an additional five offers. After the fourth, the fifth, and then the sixth, we had really lost nearly all hope of ever finding a house in this crazy market. We knew it wasn’t the best time to be looking, but our family needs to be in a house of our own.

Meanwhile, Gina’s brother in Brigham began building an addition to their house last year, and while we were walking through on Mother’s Day, he and his wife offered the basement apartment space to us to live in until we do find a house. Gina and I talked it over and ultimately decided to take them up on it. We started making preparations to move, and on June 26 (plus a few days to clean) we officially became Brighamites.

In addition to that, in early June, Gina’s mother got in contact with the owner of a house that has sat vacant for about twenty years. It turned out that the guy was thinking of selling the house, and wasn’t interesting in listing it. We were given contact info, and met with him twice, and long story short, we’re now under contract!

Despite being vacant for twenty years, the owner, whose permanent residence is in North Logan, has kept very good care of it, inside and out. There are a few major-ish projects to do before we move in, but we couldn’t be more excited about living there! The house closes on August 2, but due to the house being fully furnished with 90+ years of accumulation, the owner has asked for up to an additional 45 days to fully vacate.

The apartment part of the addition we’re now living in is still incomplete—we moved in before the kitchenette and the bathroom were finished. We got kitchen cabinets last week, and the shower walls were just installed yesterday, and still await the plumbing. We’re without kitchen and bathroom counters, including sinks. Thankfully Gina’s parents have helped ease many of the inconveniences we’ve had to live with for the past three weeks.

Living in a new city presents a lot of new opportunities photographically that I can’t wait to explore. Life, being such as it is at the moment, I haven’t been able to get out with the camera yet, but am really anxious to get out and start getting to know our new area through a lens.

52 Photographers

It's been far too quiet on this blog. I really need to make it more of a priority, and get back to posting more regularly. It's easy for me to blame stress from work (the electronics industry is insane at the moment), or the pandemic, or adjusting to two kids, but really, they're all just excuses, and at the end of the day, I have the time to keep a blog. I just need to use my time more wisely.

In addition to the Departures Blog, I keep a blog titled 52 Photographers. I started that blog back before and during my year of grad school as a way to help me find new photographers beyond those I had learned about and come to know and was getting to know as part of my graduate studies. I had only intended to let it run for a year. With a name like 52 Photographers, and featuring a new photographer each week, you could argue that I locked myself into that time frame. But years went by and I felt like I needed to feed that side of my creative life once again, and so it ran in 2018, after which I left it alone again.

Fast forward to December of last year, and the thought crept into my mind a couple of times, thinking it would be good to do something for the 2021 calendar year, but I never acted on it, and January came and went, and I figured I'd leave the blog alone for another while. But the thought to resume the blog hasn't really left me alone.

About a week ago, I decided it's time to just do it. Every time the thought entered my mind, I thought maybe I'd wait to do it in 2022, and run another volume of the blog during a calendar year, but 2022 is still a long ways off, and I don't want to wait that long. There's work I'm interested in NOW, and I want to share it sooner than later. So beginning June 5, Volume III of 52 Photographers begins! I'm excited to start it up again, and I have a lot of excellent photographers coming up, so stay tuned!