It looks like it’s time for my annual blog post… but let me do something a little different this time.

Rather than an excuse centered around “being so busy” or “adult life, am I right?” or “wow COVID is/was crazy,” it’s just easiest to be honest. I think editing, sharing images, and staying active on social media sort of sucks. I get these grand plans and ideas, but quickly stop doing the work. Though I’ve had my own website active for over ten years, it’s pretty evident if you look at the blog or YouTube history.

In either case, here’s what’s different: an experience resulting a little bit of self-discovery and coming to an understanding.

In August last year, I found time for a vacation in between switching jobs so I set out for a 3-day backpacking trip in the Hoh Rainforest with a friend. A beautiful, spectacular National Park that’s on many people’s bucket list. Not only was this hike in one of the few rainforests in the United States, it terminates to a glacier at the base of Mt. Olympus after 18 miles on the trail. As with most hikes, I brought only my digital body in order to save weight and ensure I wouldn’t miss “the shot,” if whatever “the shot” was to unfold in front of me.

But we didn’t get to see the glacier. After an overzealous 15 miles on day one to our campsite, my friend’s body was in bad shape. Being that we were in one of the most remote places in the country and cut off from any communication, an anxiety attack hit me that night and we decided to bail out a day early. Fortunately we made it out unscathed – not even bummed about missing our destination. During the trek, I thought the images I was shooting were great, but once I got home they, like many before, never saw the light of day (until a now, with a few below).

This seemingly magical rainforest simply failed to come across in the images and I hated everything. Though you’ll always hear "pictures never do justice,” I felt that there was no reason not to come out with at least one or two shots that I liked. The simple fact that I failed to come up with anything in one of the most outstanding locations made me contemplate things. Maybe I’m a little self-critical, but that’s an exploration for a later time. In short, the question became, “Why am I photographing these things when I don’t do anything with them – and in most cases, hate them?”

To understand that, we have to back up a bit.

You see, I live in Washington though most of my friends, family, and connections are still back home in California. What that means is that immediately after moving up here, I felt the need to share and document my surroundings since they were so drastically new and different. In 2015, when I moved up to Seattle, I was interested in city-life. After a lifetime in the suburbs, I yearned for a big city with lots of great reflected light, people, and energy. And here I had it. I made a ton of street photography and followed the energy of the city, turning my eye to parades, demonstrations, and protests, all the while going out on various hikes and backpacking trips to the mountains.

These – especially the hiking pictures – were things that I could send back home and share with friends and family, perhaps in search of some strange subconscious validation of my life being cool. This entire time, these images were certainly “pretty pictures” – but to me, that’s all that they were. They didn’t have substance and I didn’t know what to do with them. The event, protest, and street photography were things that, to me, were journalistic and “fleeting” in nature. Something easily forgotten in a 24-hour news cycle. Being a photojournalist sounded cool, until finding that the profession is nearly extinct. In the past, I decided to discontinue the pursuit of being a skate photographer/filmmaker for much the same reason: I was simply tired of sleeping on people’s floors and leaving so much up to chance – and companies’ meager budgets. And, with hiking, that was something where my camera was often secondary. I looked at it as a way to get me through some tough mental times and didn’t want that to become “unfun” if I were to aim for anything more out of it than therapeutic exercise. If I came home with a cool photo – great! But it still lacked substance in the editing room in terms of a bigger project, especially when there are people out there doing some far more amazing work.

And that’s where I was: having a constant internal conflict about taking cool pictures and not liking most of the results. I was trying to make something out of something I didn’t really, truly care too much about photographically.

With that on my mind, I spent the rest of the hiking season trying to make sense of my experience in the rainforest. I opted to spend my weekends driving around taking pictures of new housing developments, self-storage units, abandoned buildings, the Salton Sea, desert-junk, political signs, and other “Americana vibes” that catch my eye – and it was the best I’ve felt with photography for a long time.

What stood out to me was that these were the genres that I’d been interested in since I first started out with photography. Evident in my ongoing series Field Closed for Maintenance, I found that I’d been abandoning the very things that I was interested in and could work with on a deeper level. What that level is, I’m not sure, but all that I know is that getting the film back and actually saying “holy shit” in a good way was something that hadn’t happened in a long time.

For now, the trick is to continue following the subjects I’m interested in – not the subjects that I think I should shoot for other people. Simple, right?

So with that, here’s a few of those.

Some recent work and realizations