World Wide Photo Walk - Bozeman, MT

It's the World Wide Photo Walk! I came across this when looking at Doug Loneman's website and became intrigued. Last year I coordinated a few photo walks around Bozeman and come to find out there is a World Wide Photo Walk Day July 24th, 2010. I'm very excited, it is lead by Thomas Lee who is currently the chief photographer at Montana Quarterly Magazine and is one of the founding partners of Montana Photography Workshops. I plan on picking his brain about the magazine world in photography. And, my husband is going to join me! YAY

Debbie Graduation

Debbie is graduating!! Luckily we got some photos before the awful snow came back...and of course, we had to try a jumping picture (which turned out pretty great).

Details of Bozeman

Here are a few images from walking around Bozeman. Which one is better of the bike rack photos?

Sense of Place: Bozeman

Finally figured out, pitched and got my senior thesis project approved. Here is an excerpt from my proposal paper:
“Each place, like a person, is unique, with a style and a personality of its own…the photographer has only one job, to reveal that character and communicate it to the viewer.” Jay Maisel

In travel photography, the most important skill is being able to capture the sense of a place. To become a great travel photographer, it is important not only to photograph exotic destinations such as Greece or Africa, but also to be able to photograph any location, especially those closest in proximity. So photographing where I live is a start in my journey to becoming a travel photographer.

My senior photography project is going to capture the unique “personality” of Bozeman by photographing the people, the events, the details and architecture. I hope that this project develops my ways of seeing while exploring any destination. I am going to walk around Bozeman and photograph familiar areas and unexplored ones. The most important goal of this project is that I capture a sense of place, as Jay Maisel’s quote states.

This project is influenced by my intense wanderlust. I have always been interested in travel: Different cultures, food, people and landscapes of various countries. My travel magazines always inspire me to explore and photograph places my friends and family have never seen. It inspires me to capture these places in my own style and illustrate my own adventures. When in Greece, I saw a Georges Meiss’s work that captured the iconic things he noticed while photographing in the Greek islands: Doors, bright colors, the older locals. I immediately was interested in how he documented his adventures and he has been an inspiration to me while traveling. Jay Maisel came and gave a talk at MSU and motivated me to look at a place with an open mind and to photograph everything. The very important piece of advice that he gave to his audience – make it your own. This is what I want to do when photographing Bozeman (or anywhere for that matter).

So that ended up being much longer than I thought it was - but now you have an idea of what I will be working on all semester long.

Images from Photo Walk #1 - Success!

Our photo walk around the Story Mill Trail was a success! Bek and David showed up and the only issues we had were that we went the opposite direction of Story Mill on the trail, my battery died a half an hour in and we got attacked by mosquitoes on our last part of the trek. Luckily we found lots of cool subjects to photograph on our part of the trail, David and I just switched off batteries and the mosquitoes didn't kill us. We got to talk photo geekish and get back into the photo mode. Hopefully I'll do another photo walk here in a few weeks and more people will come. Any ideas as to where?

Butte Folk Festival tomorrow with my mom and Patrick, bringing my camera (charging my battery) and ready to photograph good ol' photogenic Butte. Hope to do some people watching and photograph the performers as well. Capturing a sense of place (like mentioned in an earlier update) - this time in Butte, which believe me, is not hard to do. Ta ta!