on the edge of creation | self portrait

If you've been on my website for the past couple of months, you've already seen this image as the main image on my homepage. For no good reason I haven't bothered to put this anywhere else on the internet, maybe because I wanted to preserve my own experience and keep the image as more of a diary entry rather than a newspaper article. But now I'm at a place where I want to share it, and share the beauty of my home of Alaska.

You can view some (a lot of) iphone images here, as well as some more words from this day.

I shot this on a workshop with my boss, Jeff Schultz, and during the whole day he talked about composition, leading lines, hyperfocal distance, and the like. If you can't tell from most of the work I post, I really love the two-thirds/one-third center composition, I love shallow depth of field, and I love portraits. I'm not a landscape photographer. So for this photo I wanted to push myself and create something completely different. I spent a good half an hour setting up the shot, doing tests, trying to figure out the best angle/position for my camera and tripod. I only shoot with a 50mm 1.8 (because that's all I have other than a kit lens and a telephoto lens), so visualizing how the scene would look after I expanded it was also a challenge.

I really loved the leading lines from both bodies of water pointing towards the glacier, and I also wanted to include myself in the photo A. for documentation that I was there, and B. to show the relationship between humans and our home. White dress, white glacier, both in a body of water (Portage Glacier is by a lake).

So different composition, different depth of field, majority landscape. A huge experiment, but an amazing one, and the result wasn't half bad.

(The other challenge was running from the camera--on a self timer--into the water which had sharp rocks on the bottom. Fortunately another workshop attendee pushed the button several times for me so I could position myself carefully.)

The rest of the day was spent running around barefoot, modeling for other people (I was technically working that day), and filming a little behind the scenes video, and just being amazed by all the beauty that surrounded me.