Whenever I head into the backcountry, I’m always carrying way too much weight—and most of that “too much” is my camera and tripod to take long exposure photos. No normal landscape photographer does the crazy shit I do when I backpack, because they won’t subject themselves to putting in the work required to get true large-format shots. Why do I do this? Because I want to capture these landscapes, print them with mind-blowing detail, and share them with people who actually want to put real art on their walls.
I’ve been doing this for ten years. When I started, only a few of us were out there shooting the Milky Way. Now, every spoon-fed whelp living in mommy and daddy’s basement is out there doing their “influencing,” capturing your eye for half a second before the audience bounces to the next high-ISO phone snapshot. Before I started posting photos again, I asked myself: What is the next challenge I can do that these screen-swiping mo-mos can’t?
The answer was to keep going where I love to go, and just suffer a little more.
I’m still taking the same foundational gear—my full-frame Sony A-series and a tripod—but I’m upping the game with ND filters. This is an analog method I’m bringing into the digital world to force motion and dimension into a still print.
I really saw this come to life on a non-backpacking stop at Zion National Park a couple of years ago. I was shooting The Watchman from the bridge where everyone lines up for sunset. It’s a notoriously overshot composition; even Lik did one of his cartoony graphic-design prints there to try and make it look unique.
I shot it in April 2022 right after it rained. I had shot this spot 14 times before, so I threw an ND filter on the lens just for shits and giggles. The end result was incredible—the river silked over and the clouds dragged into motion. I process my work as close to conventional photography as possible, just dodging the sky and burning the foreground in Camera Raw rather than over-producing it. When a client ordered that shot printed on aluminum, the layered depth of the meandering river and moving sky made it look nearly 3D.
I’ve been putting this technique to the test on my latest backpacking trips in the Sierra Nevada. Up at Long Lake and Gem Lake, the afternoon winds chop up the water surface, creating inconsistent rippling that ruins standard shots.
It gives you a glassy, dimensional perspective that you literally cannot capture with the naked eye.
Give it some time, and between Apple and AI, the gap in standard photography is going to close. People will be generating large-format images of what a place might look like.
The only way to separate myself from the rest of the pack is the extra effort, the heavy pack, and mastering the light. More and more of these long-exposure shots will be rolling out of my printer this year. Digital screens don’t do them justice—if you want to see how this motion looks for yourself, book a time to meet me at the gallery here in Vegas on Rainbow and Russell.
Which print are you most curious to see on aluminum at the gallery—the glassy depths of the Sierra lakes, or the silked motion of the Zion Watchman?
