water portraits
sparkles, tessellations & kaleidoscopic reflections
This series was born out of my deep love for water. I've always been drawn to water. Sprinklers, water hoses and swimming pools, mountain streams, waterfalls, lakes, oceans, rivers, all of it. I most want to be in water, but if I can't be in it, then get me out on it or right next to it (although, if I'm next to it, it's safe to bet that at the very least my feet and legs are going in!). I decided to marry my love of water with my interest in photography and see what happened. For three weeks in late Summer of 2016, I traveled to a mountain river, a rocky Pacific coastline, a pristine glacier lake, and in and around Puget Sound.
I shot with a manual focus lens so that I could control how the light was reflected and translated through the camera. Believe it or not, these photos haven't been highly processed. In fact, the stranger any given photo seems to look, the less I messed with it. No photo-editing could come up with some of the strange beauty revealed to me during my photographic adventures! What I enjoyed the most in working with this series was discovering what's hiding in plain sight. Water is fleeting and moving and ever-changing. Constant movement paired with ever-changing lighting conditions makes for so much color, light, reflection, and movement to capture. The challenge of an always-changing subject makes for a most rewarding experience. My efforts were not only rewarded with a collection of photos that I love, but with a heightened ability to see water differently with the naked eye. I now notice details, textures, patterns, and colors that I missed before. It's most rewarding, like uncovering mysteries again and again.