Making photographs is my passion. I also like sipping a good red wine over dinner with friends, hiking, whitewater rafting, driving the west, a good novel, poetry, a variety of music (Dvorak to Dylan!), trying to write, and a host of other lesser interests. But at the end of the day, I am most happy and proud when I finish a new or re-seen older image and print it! My goal with Fill Your Frame Workshops is to share that passion with you, thereby keeping both of our creative fires burning.
If you'd like to "giv'er a go" here's what to do.
1- Send me an email stating your interest and suggest/state a few dates for our first encounter.
2- I'll reply as promptly as I can.
If you’re contracting me for a one or multi-day, in Moab workshop we’ll follow this line -
3- We select a date (dates) for an introductory phone or zoom call. 4- Before the call I’ll send you a brief questionnaire that will aid our conversation. 5- During our call, we’ll agree on the dates for your workshop. 6- You’ll be sent a short Liability Contract and a PAYPAL INVOICE for 50% of the workshop fee. 7- You’ll come, we’ll work. 8- After finishing I’ll invoice you for the remaining fee.
If you’re contracting me for the BW Image Transformation follow these steps -
3- Send your image(s) on or before our chosen date. (File size information will be discussed)
4- I'll reply with finished work within 48 hours (unless noted in email). The reply will include a PayPal invoice AND an extended written discussion of what I did to your image and why. If you ordered prints they’ll be shipped with 3-days.
5- You pay. We both smile! You say to yourself, "Well, that was worth it, let's try the next phase."
Just how does this work?
To begin scheduling your tailor-made, one-on-one, Fill Your Frame Photo session email me potential dates by clicking here.
My view . . .
Making a good photograph is an active experience! We'll converse about what you want from the experience and then we'll work towards that. I find the outdoor and the computer/print experiences of making a good photograph equally invigorating.
Language. I use language that reflects my personal philosophy; hence, we don't TAKE pictures, we MAKE photographs. Making requires the use of personal energies, physical, intellectual, and creative. We see, we compose, we move around, we feel, we think, we feel again, we print, we share, we smile, we win.
I'd no more shoot pictures than I'd shoot a wild western mustang. Again, I go out to make photographs. And in so doing I don't capture the image, for it is a wild thing that will roam free once I leave the scene. I gather or collect pixels, like an herbalist walking through a forest, you pick parts of some plants and leave the rest to replenish for next time. Out West here, the cowboys refer to "the gather." It's a place where the cattle will naturally tend to go once you start rounding them up from the surrounding landscape.
Instead of processing, which is what we do to cheese and most unhealthy "fast foods," I use the term "resolve." "Let us resolve this photograph by balancing the contrast between sky and ground, increasing the contrast in that shadow there, and then enhancing the colored leaves in the forest." Every decision has a reason(s) that should move the photograph forward to its most expressive point. As photographers, it's our "work" and I state it as such, no different than the honest work of a good plumber, a builder, a painter or a poet. Digital work may involve more devices than the good old darkroom that I still have, but it's still work. The term "resolve" also conveys that there's human intellectual consideration being given to all aspects of making the photograph. Processing offers me the short film of an image being tossed into a vat of other images and all relegated to some mindless, machine-based, average-making cycle where the finished products all look the same. Not my photographs!
I have a wealth of knowledge and experience to draw from. Here's the Cliff's Notes version.
I became interested in photography in high school and built a narrow darkroom under the stairs in the unfinished basement of my parents' home, so I had to stoop lower and lower as I moved prints through the developing trays. In college, I took every opportunity to backpack southern Utah and became quite familiar with un-marked places that are now targeted by YouTube influencers and the like. About the same time, I became interested in BW, was mentored by John Telford and Al Weber, and purchased a 4x5 to work with those beautiful big negatives and transparencies.
There was always lots of hiking. Lots of Photos. Lots of Dreams of being published. Visit the "about" section of my personal website to see how they've come true! Photography has been my way of living, in that I see photographically ALL THE TIME. I see single, still images that make up the movie of my life. That's the main thing. I've also been contracted by satisfied publishers, companies and agencies to make pictures for them. Clients have included the National Park Service, KC Publications, Sierra Press, School of American Research Press and our hometown Canyonlands Natural History Association. I'm now at liberty to make the images I want to make for myself.
Woven into the fabric of my life since 1978 has been my other life - teaching art by being Art Coach! to children across the Four Corners area. It started in Montezuma Creek on the Utah strip of the Navajo Reservation (10 years), then migrated to the Eight Northern Pueblo Day Schools north of Santa Fe (for 8 years) after serving as Director of Education at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian (Santa Fe) for two years. I came home to the home I purchased in Moab (1989) in 2000, and I'm not leavin'! For 15 years, I was Art Coach! at HMK Elementary School, creating a program recognized throughout the state and nation.
My degree in Elementary Art Education has equipped me with the tools and desire to teach the language and process of art to children - of all ages - including YOU!
"Composition is the strongest way of seeing," stated photographic guru Edward Weston. And the key to making YOUR composition strong is knowing the Language of Art. You will learn some of that language with me. It's much more than "having a feel for it," and it’s certainly NOT following someone else when they say “this is the shot.” IT IS KNOWING the dynamic relationships between the Elements & Principles of Art, and how best to employ them to make the images YOU want to make!
There is no "give and take" for me, there's just give and give. The landscape gives us all this beauty to behold and we, in return, employ our human creativity to return the beauty back, as translated through ourselves, into our photographs. I want to aide you in doing this at a higher level than you currently are.
If you like the sound of this, then let’s work!
