This year, I have made a large shift in my work, and that shift has afforded me considerable opportunity to travel and do photography. I’ve travelled more in the last 6 months than I have in a very long time, and explored vast areas of France, the Pacific Northwest, and the Northeastern US. While my travels have required numerous long flights, and many hours in cars, the travel I remember most is that done on foot. I’ve walked many miles through the streets of some wonderful cities: Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Seattle, Portland, Philadelphia and New York. In this time I’ve taken over 7000 digital photos, and somewhere near 600 on film.
As Winter approaches here in Montana, I have resigned myself to staying close to home through the end of the year, but I’m not at all prepared to put my cameras down. So I’ve built myself a nice little photo studio in my house and have begun a project to shoot portraits of the many writers and artists who call Montana home. I’ve compiled a list of potential subjects, and am now reaching out to people about being featured. My intention is to shoot each session with both high-resolution digital and large format (4×5 and 8×10) film. I will print the resulting images for exhibition. I plan on doing a combination of platinum/palladium prints, albumen prints, with perhaps a few traditional fibre-based photo paper and digital ink-jet prints. Most will be contact printed from large format negative, including the digital images which I will use to create 8×10 and 11×14 digital negatives.
Yesterday afternoon I invited dancer Quentin Robinson to the studio to get the process started. We worked for a couple of hours and shot four 8×10 and eight 4×5 negatives, as well as a few digital (mostly as tests). I’ll close this post with a sample of those digital test images.
Quentin is an amazing artist who combines his unique style of dance with his desire to help people. He has spoken at many of the nations top conferences and events and shared the stage with countless talented performers. I encourage everyone to check out his IndieGoGo page, Movements For Movement which he describes as, “Dance & Movement Therapy in the treatment of trauma associated with poverty and violence” and hopefully give him some support in this effort.