Bodie And More

I went to Bodie State Historic Park yesterday, which is a place where I’ve always wanted to go to photograph for the longest time. Bodie is a ghost town in a state of arrested decay high up in the eastern Sierras that was gold boomtown in the late 1800s and early 1900s. After going there yesterday and making over 150 images, I know I’ll have to go back, perhaps on a weekday when less people are there, to get more images. I would rather have my images more “natural looking” to Bodie in its time period, and having people in modern dress blows that look and feel I focused mostly on the exterior buildings, and the next time I want to focus more on what’s inside the buildings.

After going to Bodie, I went down to Mono Lake since I was so close to photograph some of the tufa, but with time running short, I couldn’t stay long. I’ll have to go back and shoot it more when I can spend the majority of a day there. Both shooting Bodie and Mono Lake were life goals of mine, and I’m glad I got to go, and I look forward to going back, knowing now what to expect from both places and how to approach them better next time.

The images of Bodie can be seen here. While there aren’t a lot of them up as of today, I will be posting more in the future. I really have a lot of images to process.

New Things

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted. I’ve been dealing with a lot of stuff, but I’m back to shooting and it feels good. I made some really nice images of the American River near Lake Tahoe last week, and a good friend suggested another series for me to work on, which I’ve started. More on that later, soon, I promise, when I have more material to release.

I found this river location by a campsite on Highway 50 by chance, and I spent about an hour and a half there as the sun went down. I didn’t venture out into the river, and walking on the rocks next to the river got a little dicey with the camera gear in tow, but it all worked out. I’m really happy with what I brought back from this shoot.

One of the new things for me that I started working on is also shooting people. I spent four days last month in the Monterey area shooting one person, and while it was supposed to be fun and just for a few hours a day, they turned into all day shoots consisting of nearly 1,000 images where only about 20 were usable for what was intended. It was work, but it was also an awesome experience.

I’m going to start photographing people in various areas: weddings, portraits, senior portraits and events. I’m not walking away from fine art photography, but I’m adding to what I do.