wisconsinhiker's photostream  

Hi.

I've been taking pictures for a while but got "serious" about it a few years ago. I wanted to get to a place where my camera felt like an extension of me. On a good day I'm there. I've got pre-visualization down well enough that it works some of the time.

I've experimented with a wide variety of styles. Some of my work is experimental and abstract. Some of it is "modernist" looking to people like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Paul Strand as models. Some of it is more neo-pictorialist looking farther back to late 19th and early 20th century photographers for ideas. My favorite photographer in that area is Edward Steichen. The modernists I mentioned above all worked in pictorialism early on and some ideas in their early work help out as I'm trying to work with the style.

I also study works in other mediums. That ranges from Hudson River School painters to the abstract expressionists to traditional Chinese and Japanese art. I like a lot of different styles and like to experiment with mixing them together to maybe find a synthesis that I hadn't thought of. Maybe even get original.

My subjects have ranged widely over the years, but my main focus has been on nature for the past few years. This is primarily because that's what I've been thinking about and focusing on more broadly. Photography is a way of exploring nature more deeply. This has taken me to many different places including mountains, deserts, forests and sea shores. I've done some of my best work in wilderness areas out west, primarily in Washington and California. My home state of Wisconsin remains my most challenging subject. An epic, grand subject like Yosemite or Death Valley is a lot easier to work with than a gently rolling Wisconsin prairie. One of my main challenges right now is to find a way of representing the Wisconsin landscape in a way that feels as well articulated and engaging as my work out west. It's an ongoing process.

I shoot film and scan it into my computer. I usually do some work on the pictures in Photoshop. That varies from picture to picture. I don't see my pictures as having to be literal documents - they aren't intended to report exactly and objectively what a particular place looked like at a particular time. They are subjective interpretations of a time and place. However, sometimes my subjective experience best expressed through a "straight" version of the photograph, so I don't mess with the scan much at all. I do some HDR stuff, but I use it to balance out light and dark areas in a scene and try to minimize artifacts of the process. I try to hide it in the background rather than have the technique on the surface. I even let some dark areas stay dark. Mostly, I'm trying to put together a picture similarly to the way my mind puts together a picture. I can go off on that tangent for a long time, but I'll stop there.

I'm not a professional photographer: I'm entirely self-taught. I studied music composition in college. The esthetic issues I dealt with in music end up being there in photography as well. I had a professor who was very much into debating concept and esthetic principles, so I end up going there with pictures as well. It also led me to write long, wordy descriptions of why and how I take pictures. Sometimes I get psyched for taking pictures with music. Usually it's somebody like Beethoven, Haydn or Bach. I play Beethoven's 6th symphony a lot before or during taking pictures. It's the nature thing. Just a weird thing about me. Maybe TMI... anyway...

One of the things I seek in nature is solitude. John Muir once said that while in nature he may have been by himself, but he was never alone. While many of my pictures are taken while by myself, I have a sense that I'm not alone. I guess part of what I try to do in my pictures is to show that. There are a lot of ways one can interpret "not alone", but, personally, I keep it pretty minimal and unconstructed. If you get that sense through my pictures, then I've been successful. You're welcome to interpret as you please.