Black Clover

A shot of my new tent, the Hilleberg Staika. My old tent, a bibler fitzroy from back in the day before the black diamond buy out failed miserably in the field a few months ago and has since been decommissioned. I’m still working it through with black diamond.

Shot with a 35mm f/1.4. Side note, I want to take this tent up mount Kilimanjaro.

PS - I had a hard time finding good first person reviews and photos of this tent online that were even remotely recent so if you found this while searching for Staika information, hit me up personally or leave a comment and I’d be happy to help out.

My guitar amp shot with my 35mm f/1.4 and some post-production jack of the contrast. And no, it does not go to eleven Garth.

I lost most of my favorite drawing pens and as I was sifting through an old box of crap to find some I found this old travel journal. On the very last page was one sentence.

The reward of suffering, is experience.

I think it odd and enlightening that I still have the ability to surprise myself. Having not only forgotten about the journal I also don’t really recall where and under what circumstances I wrote this. Well, not really.

I think you can read what you will into it and draw your own meaning. In my eyes the beauty lays in it’s complex simplicity. Personal. Haunted. And Existential.

Shot blindly with my 35mm prime.

Shot in remote mode using my pc and the 35mm f/1.4.

I draw. I draw a lot. And as I always like to remind myself before I grab my pen, my sketches need not be good, wholesome, meaningful, or artful. They just need to be me.

Some suck. Some are good. But all are me.

UPDATE:  Had a few queries in my box about the written portion since it was faded and hard to make out.

“I own tomorrow. I don’t own tomorrow.”

I don’t spend much time crafting much of anything anymore. With sketches it’s just kind of there.  It’s a thought or a feeling or an experience that I just kind of play with. One day I was reflecting on how much of life I own, how much I control. And the options and decisions are there for me to take it by the throat and kill it, put my arms around it and love it, or be complacent and unresponsive. And then there’s the other side to life. The tomorrow I don’t own, the tomorrow I can’t control even if the desire was there. Sickness. Love. Death.

I once explained that life was circle A and circle B. In circle A was everything you can control and in circle B was everything you couldn’t. And what’s always been important to me is to dominate and be as successful as I can with everything in circle A, but more importantly to love the process and idea of a circle B with the same enthusiasm.  To love the process of just letting go.

Shot using my 35mm this is one of the few actual records I own, Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble’s 1983 Texas Flood. A classic worth picking up if you haven’t already. This record used to hang in my office along with SRV’s In Step. Now it collects dust awaiting the next office hanging party if and when that moment arrives.

Shot with the 35mm in a crap ass Seattle storm at the local pea patch garden. I love what the local gardeners do in an odd romantic kind of way so photography is really quite easy to pull off in their gardens. As most of the flowers, fruits, and vegetables are in the middle of death this time of year there was one orange flower in the middle of the plot.

Perhaps it’s just me at this moment. But this is oddly reminisce of where i am right now in life. Oddly defiant against nothing, alone, happy, and waiting for the seasons to turn.

Shot at ISO 3200 to blow out the photo with loads of grainy bits. Why? No reason really. Because I can. Because the camera allows for it and I seldom follow rules. Because everything else is too easy. I used my 70-200mm f/4.0 which is easily my least used lens in my stash, quite frankly because I suck with this lens. And by suck I mean I really just suck at coaxing a good shot out of it. I’m revisiting her however, maybe this time around I’ll pay attention and learn something, maybe even coax a shot or two.

The shot is of a double-doored fridge.

Shot with my 35mm at an accidental f/1.4 and ISO 800, this is my sisters cat questioning the use of my new remote. I’ve noticed that the large flat screen in back (off screen) is an excellent source of light and color schemes that can produce some whack shot effects if done right. Not so much in this shot however.

One really doesn’t need to do much in wine country to make shit turn out. This was shot in Walla Walla, Washington during the peak of crush in the a’Maurice Winery vineyard. It’s amazing to me how gracious vineyard management and farmers are with us oenophiles that pack camera equipment around asking marginally stupid questions. I hope I did right by all of them.

This was shot with my 40d and 35mm f/1.4. Untouched in post production. Just like the a’Maurice chardonnay.

There’s really only so much to say about hitting the road. It’s fulfilling, void, new, hard, refreshing, uncertain yet so certain. It leaves marks on your mind, marks on your body, and marks on your heart. The road is my escape.

Shot with with my Rebel Xti and 50mm f/1.4 . For my Walla Walla crush trip I took both of my SLR bodies with differing lens set ups. In post-pro I pulled out the color and bumped up the contrast.