Mental Checklist

I've been (blessed?) cursed with a photographic memory, while not on the level that you see on TV, I can recall past situations/events/conversations/etc with relative ease. I don't exactly have control over it though and sometimes my memory just doesn't "come" to me like I want it to. Being a landscape and nature photographer though, this is extremely helpful because I can look at a photo and remember most everything about it...years after I saw it. 

For example, I saw a photo that the very talented Sarah Marino took of corn lilly plants years ago and I wanted to shot a similar photo. So, each summer for the past three years I've been looking for just the right patch of corn lilly. It turns out (and this is almost always the case) that getting a good, close-up shot of corn lilly isn't as easy as you would think. Corn lilly grows in abundance near Crested Butte, Colo., and I visit the area every summer. Each year I have tried and failed, no depth of field, wrong lighting, dead plants, out of focus, etc. Now corn lilly isn't the ONLY thing on my mind when I'm looking for shots, but I really wanted to get a great photo of these plants because of their vivid color. 

So this summer I'm in Crested Butte with two friends and it is just raining cats and dogs. We eat lunch and decide to take a drive, figuring that if we see anything cool we'll stop but we're not going to go to extremes on a soggy, rainy day. After finding lots of subjects, we roll up to some wildflowers and the lighting is just bad for the wildflowers. I look down and there is a bunch of corn lillies packed together. I aim my lens straight down and start composing a shot, and after some experimentation, I got the shot that I had been seeking! 

And now a new feature! I recently made the switch to Shopify and I have been testing out my store on their platform (which I really like so far) and if you are interested in the above photo, you can now buy directly from this site. You'll be taken to a checkout portal if you choose to buy, but it's an easy and secure way to purchase my photography. For qualifying photos, I'll include a buy box for convenient buying. Test it out, don't be shy!