So this is an image of my name in Valley, taken from a secret location of Hunts Mesa.
So a couple of people asked me what location I was at, but I've always kind of enjoyed
going to iconic locations or photographic, iconic images.
You know, at first I was thinking, do I want to go spend time doing that, because some
of these areas have been photographed so much, but I was like, well, why should that
stop me?
So because everybody's got a different vision of things that, how they feel about a location
or what they see.
So this is, I had been to my name in Valley two or three times before, but I always had
in my mind a specific image that it took me, I think, a couple of trips to really get that
focused into my mind what it was supposed to look like.
So this one, I was up on Hunts Mesa for probably, I think it was like four days.
Hunts Mesa is a large geographical Mesa just outside of my name in Valley.
I think it's actually in, it's in Arizona, but it took a while to get to the location
or the composition that I was looking for.
So the last day I was there, we finally made it and I was waiting for the light to be right.
Woke up early, isolated, there's nobody up on there, it's a Navajo, it's actually private
Navajo land and I was just with my, my Navajo guide and it really helped me actually because
I had spent some time with him and we had talked a lot about the Navajo culture and
a lot about the language and being a Navajo in these days now is, it's a pretty rough
life.
It's been a rough life for a long time, but this is their land and I just felt like indebted
to do justice to their land, it's a pretty special place to them.
I know that there's a lot of history in Monument Valley, but if you throw out all the commercialism
and all the commercials you see on TV and all the hoopla about everything, it's just
an amazing sight.
So this is a picture out of my mind before I went out there, this is I think my third
or fourth trip I'd have to count back, there's Shiprock, which took me about two weeks to
get what I wanted, but also Canyonlands, the trip I took recently, I think that was my
fifth trip back and I think it was, the fifth trip was the culmination of everything, things
that I had envisioned about the location.
I think I'm not done with Canyonlands, but what I captured on this last trip was definitely
a big step forward for me and what I had pre-visualized before I went out there.
Yeah, it takes a while for me, even if I go out, I usually don't go out for trips at
a less than a week, let's say, but the first couple days I almost can't shoot because I'm
just detoxing from my personal life and when I start, just like getting in touch with a
person if you're going to do a portrait, I have to get in touch with the environment,
it's like it's pretty hard to describe, but I wait for, I guess it's kind of a personal
signal that it's time to go, that I finally got in touch with the environment and then
I start to shoot.
So usually that takes at least two or three days minimum just for me to just get over that
and it's really an impatient time for me because I'm not sure I'll ever get there.
It's like just waiting and waiting and waiting for that signal, it's like when's it going
to come, it's like give up your ego, just drop everything, get in touch with the land
and then things start to open up.
It's kind of the only way to describe it and I think the blog a little bit is like
extending it up, being in bright sunlight and walking into a dock room and you can't
see anything and then maybe 15 minutes later it all starts to look like it's in the daylight.
It's kind of like what the experience is for me.
It's kind of the only way to describe it and I think it's kind of the only way to describe
it.
