Practicing depth of field with flowers

Rocking Horse Training

Sometimes everything works out.

Monuments are often photographed as subjects time and time again. In Portland we have a beautiful cityscape full of wonderful bridges, buildings, and even mountains that make it a nighttime photographer's playground. The OHSU Tram Tower can be easily overlooked. But at night it is a favorite of mine to explore and find new ways of seeing.

I shot this image for a series of double exposures I was working on for a photo project as a student at PCC. I never used the photos for the double exposure project, but a family member saw the negative and asked for a print of it. There is nothing extraordinary about the photo, perhaps if I had used them for my project there could be some artistic twist, but that is where I embrace the cliché; there is always someone out there who will appreciate the things we make, even if we ourselves find them cliché and bland.

Anticipating a view of the ocean, we set out on a hike to the end of Cape Lookout. What we encountered was the opposite of a sunny summer day.

As a landscape photographer, it often feels that whenever this time period rolls around, everyone seems to rush around the PNW hunting for compositions to showcase our beloved Milky Way. Unfortunately, in doing so, the vast majority of photos look relatively similar and end up focusing entirely on the Milky Way - almost forgetting the vast beauty astrophotography has to offer otherwise. In this specific image, the Milky Way was clearly visible and roaring behind me over the Cape Kiwanda Haystack but I decided to turn my back and look towards the remainder of the beautiful starry night sky focusing on... Just the Stars.

This photograph was created for Challenge #7 which was either to photograph a common photographic cliché scene and create a non cliché print or satirize it making it ultra cliché. This is a photograph of Stirling Falls, one of the main waterfalls in New Zealand's Fjordland National Park in Milford Sound. This waterfall is an icon for New Zealand and Milford Sound and it's a standard "trophy shot" for tourists. It is photographed thousands of times per day from tourist cruises on Milford Sound, is a common postcard photo and is a feature picture in travel brochures and books about New Zealand.

On the morning we visited Milford Sound it was overcast, misting, and foggy. Rather than creating a typical tourist photo, I immediately saw it as a mysterious, dark, mystical, brooding, low key, and other worldly "Lord of the Rings" place and created a photograph with that in mind.

Midday in a heatwave, a horse drinks from a trough

Sometimes there can be more beauty found in death than there is in life - and that is definitely true when photographing florals.

Three of my favorite cliches to work with are closeups of flowers, lots of bokeh, and writing words on my photos. For this image, I threw them all together and went for a satirical version by writing the word Yellow, which is the predominant color of the image. I chose a small flower to focus on, leaving the majority of the image to fade into the background, and I picked an overly stylized font to emphasize the word.