January 8th 2016
"The fateful path of small ideas."
I recently stumbled upon an essay I wrote for a local magazine regarding Malibu. How interesting to read something I wrote 3 years ago now. Thought I would share it again. How time flies.
"The Fateful path of small ideas"
“When I was 19 or so living just outside of Boston, in a strip mall Barnes and Noble located on bald hill road in Warwick Rhode Island, I stumbled upon a book from an artist called David Muench, a color landscape photography book. The images from these photographs spoke to me in a big way. Each moment delightfully frozen and presented perfectly for me to admire. The crazy colors literally jumped from those crisp new smelling pages and into my very soul. That exact moment something happened to me. A small idea was born. In my tiny New England world, perhaps hope crept in and I was awakened to the possibility that there was something more out there. It inspired me and my life changed in that instant. For 20 years now, I’ve chased falling light from the eastern shores of Boston to the western pacific sands of Malibu, my home now. I'm aware, that in the life of a photographer, I've hardly a hand on the rung of a very long ladder of future accomplishments, blurred by baby steps, failures, distractions and hills yet to climb and tumbled upon. But "the path" I walk today is my own. It’s amazing to think about how far I’ve come and what I’ve manifested in my life, all from a small seedling of an idea that was planted in my young mind almost 20 years ago as I gazed across a bookshelf and unknowingly opened that first fateful page... I can only hope that what I’ve created and still hope to create in this life inspires you to cherish and explore your own surroundings, to marvel gloriously at this still wild place called Malibu and beyond, to protect it and perhaps, to my absolute delight, to seek out that special dance of light and dark on your own and to smile defiantly in the face of the beautiful and majestic natural world that is around you.”
Regarding this image: I plan on changing the home photo to this website rather often as it’s a fairly simple process. This again is an HD video still from my Canon T3i camera mounted with a Sigma 24mm F2.4 lens which I almost never remove. The 24mm F2.4 on this crop sensor camera seems to give me the best balance of focal distance, image sharpness and depth of field for some great all around video documentary style footage, especially when run through Magic Bullet Looks or any other film like post software. I also use 2 Gopros which I’m not super crazy about for several reasons, the most significant being that the exposure setting and color is kind of hit or miss, especially during very dramatic moments of sunset and sunrise. Also the wide angle settings are a bit fishy to me and don’t exactly add to the wow and drama of moon footage. They do have their place however. What can I say, I’m a big fan of the T3i colors and overall video quality. To say nothing of that fact I’ve owned it for years and practically ran it through a washing machine and it’s never had a single hic up. I took this footage during an unplanned summer time-lapse trip following a pacific storm into the White Mountains of California. I’m about 10,000 feet or so in this image with Owens valley separating me from the white capped Eastern Sierras in the distance. Is there anything finer?