New Mexico has finally been getting rain showers over the past few days, the first real rain of the year. At Twin Lakes private club in Santa Rosa NM, locals say the water level has gone down over previous summers. The evidence is not hard to see along the shoreline. I made this series of pictures of the Lucero family on assignment for the Guadalupe County Communicator, not too bad considering I didn’t know what I might be photographing when I arrived in town that day.
My thanks to Dolores, Lorenzo, Xavier, Nastasia and Maddox.
I spent a wonderful afternoon going to White Mesa with Michael and Juliette to make some engagement portraits last week. It gave me a chance to get to know them better before I photograph their wedding in the fall, and I like to think it helps them get comfortable and be natural and relaxed with the camera. There are a few more pictures of the happy couple on my archive.
Being a photographer has offered me many backstage pass opportunity’s, and getting to go 2,150 feet underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southern NM was one of those opportunities I love. Most of the funds were being spent building a new road to the facility, but I couldn’t pass up a chance to go underground. Lighting was a great challenge here, as most of the area is pitch black aside from the headlamps. Scary dark. Creative use of off camera flash wasn’t just for fun, it was essential.
In 2010, along with fellow photographers Michael J. Gallegos, Mark Holm and Jake Schoellkopf, I was commissioned by the New Mexico Office of Recovery and Reinvestment to document how some of the stimulus dollars were spent around New Mexico. This is the first post is a series of six on the work I did for NMORR.
This summer I took a detour / scenic route on a weekend road trip to Denver to see a concert. I mentioned my plans to avoid taking the familiar I-25 to my mother who told me of the Colorado Gators Reptile Park located 17 miles north of Alamosa, CO. on Highway 17.
Alligators? In Colorado? How had I never heard of this before? I love gators, but growing up in the southwestern desert, they are not too common a site.
I hope to return to the park and spend some real time working on a story in the future.
If you like Gators too, may I recommend a couple things: First, Photographer Jill Richards and her husband Scott left their jobs and packed their dogs and hit the road for a year. I met Jill when she was an intern at The Albuquerque Journal. They have a recent blog post about spending the night in a gator infested state park in Louisiana. It’s a really fun read, might just make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
If that’s not enough, check out Trouble The Water, which looks at the alligator farming industry in Louisiana through photographer Matt Eich‘s’s thoughtful eyes.
I spent a few days making pictures of two of my favorite people, my nieces Kyla and Alanna. Mostly I shot bw film 120 film with my Holga, but it might be weeks before I am able to process it and print or scan it. For now, here is an underwater shot with my Canon G9. If I didn’t have the underwater housing, I doubt I’d still keep the G9.
Waterproof housings for your DSLR typically come in two varieties: cheap bags that leave you wanting more in way of results, or extremely expensive cases that leave your bank account wanting more in way of funds. Outex hits a happy medium, providing much higher quality results than your typical bag housing for between $250 and $400 depending on your camera. […]
Photographers Andy Anderson, William Allard, Jim Arndt, Daniel Beltra, Mark Gooch, Andy Mahr, Kurt Markus, David Spielman, Matt Turley and Olaf Veltman got the call of a lifetime when veteran adman Jimmy Bonner of The Richard’s Group phoned with simple instructions and a mantra from Paul Harvey. He asked them to go spend time with farmers and ranchers and ta […]
Link: Emerging Talent – Ian Bates | The Visual Student Its really tough figuring out whether or not I want try to get a job at a newspaper (if there are any jobs available) or if I want to put my energy into building a freelance business. Right now I am aiming towards trying my luck at being a freelance photographer but I’m not sure exactly where I want to b […]
New Mexico has finally been getting rain showers over the past few days, the first real rain of the year. At Twin Lakes private club in Santa Rosa NM, locals say the water level has gone down over previous summers. The evidence is not hard to see along the shoreline. I made this series of pictures of the Lucero family on assignment for the Guadalupe County Communicator, not too bad considering I didn’t know what I might be photographing when I arrived in town that day.
