Growing up with a photographer as a father and an illustrator as a mother, I've always had a strong interest in art of all forms, but especially visual art. I tried drawing many times over the years, but always had difficulty with it. Although I enjoyed the process, my sketches never came out the way I pictured them. They never looked 'real' enough, and time after time I gave up in frustration.

 

I found that I took much more naturally to photography, but I was still upset with my inability to capture scenes, especially larger ones, they way they looked through my eyes. No matter how well I framed, balanced, and lit, I never felt I could capture exactly how beautiful and grand the things I was photographing looked in real life.

   

This summer, on a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, I experimented with taking close-up photographs of different things in nature, and discovered that close-up photographs have the unique ability to to show the subjects in intricate detail, framed or focused in ways that the human eye would have trouble seeing.

 I'd finally found a way to free myself from the need to measure up to reality that had always made art so difficult for me. Instead of struggling to capture the beauty of reality in my photos exactly as it looked, I could reveal that beauty in a way that was unique to the photographs themselves.

I couldn't be more excited to explore this technique further.