Romance is Dead

Every year I take a few road trips to eastern Colorado for the big skies, open plains and slow roads. I love shooting farms, grass on the roadsides, wildflowers and I consider myself lucky if I find water towers, trains or old cars. The old farms & dried up towns fascinate me and I never get tired of wandering to these out of the way places to see what there is to see.

This trip I decided to go to Pawnee National Grasslands. I’ve seen it on the map and dreamed about going for years but had never quite made it that direction, even though it’s only 2 hours from Denver. I had such romantic notions of majestic open grasslands for miles. Unspoiled, untouched and pretty much left the way the native Americans would have experienced them.

I was incredibly disappointed to find that these lands have been badly torn up for what I can only surmise is greed. I.nearly turned around to go home. The landscape has small pockets of manmade devastation everywhere. Dozens of gas & oil rigs, and the associated infrastructure, spill across these grasslands like open wounds festering on the land. Whatever protections they may have once had have been seriously degraded. The land is injured in ways that it will likely never recover from.

Needless to say, it was a very disappointing trip in this respect. But in terms of making photographs, I took it as a challenge to try to shoot around the spoilage and create something beautiful anyway. If you stop at just the right place on the hill or crouch down just low enough… you can create photos that don’t resemble reality at all. There were some beautiful things about this area but they were difficult to find. Challenge accepted. You can see my results below.

Denver Abstraction

One of the reasons I insist on living downtown is so that I can be close to all of the fantastic city buildings that makeup the city of Denver. Most photographers are particularly drawn to one or a couple of subjects in particular. At the top of the list for me is architecture with good lines. Denver has no shortage of buildings with great lines and I spend a lot of time circling them and considering the best way to capture them.

These were taken on a short walk I took on a Friday night at the museums that are 3 blocks from my apartment. The Denver Art Museum is probably my favorite in terms of the building itself. Sharp angles loom high over the sidewalks and walkways. A bit of a jenga building from the outside and theinterior is no less interesting.

My favorite museum if the Clyfford Still museum though. His artwork is breathtaking and I love that he insisted that his work only be shown together and with no one else’s work. He was absolutely right in knowing that’s the best way to see and understand his work. This museum does a stellar job exhibiting his art. I absolutely love shooting this building with the Denver Art Museum in the background.



Another New Beginning

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
— Steve Jobs

This is the launch post of my new website, finally using my own name. It’s something I’m reeeeally excited about. I waited far too long to do it and had to learn a lot to get here.

The last seven years have been a wild and amazing journey in my life. I wondered back then what the hell I was doing as I turned my life upside down in a painful way. I only knew that I had to, so I did, but I had absolutely no idea what to do next.

I love looking back now and being able to connect the dots. Seeing how other people are happier, I’m happier and all the stops along the way that brought me right here. Seeing and doing so many things that I only dreamed of before.

I couldn’t have known it then, but burying myself in my creative pursuits was probably the best thing I could have done. Learning to see differently while creating my photos also helped me see things differently in my life.  Coming back to writing after so many years away was like a life-affirming hug from an old friend who understands you like no one else.  We’ll never part ways again. These are the things that have sustained me, along with incredible friends that stuck by me and understood. (You know who you are!)

Now I find myself here with photography front & center in my life. Teaching others and creating my best work yet.  Feet firmly on the ground knowing where I’m going now and what to do next.  With this new website, finally owning my work under my own name.  

I love knowing that the dots all lead us to exactly where we should be at exactly the right time… The universe always has a way of bringing things around full circle, sometimes when you least expect it.