A history of wanderlust
Hello, and welcome to my photography blog! My name is Blake, and I’d like to take the opportunity to talk about why I picked up a professional-grade camera.
There has always been a spark within me telling me to travel in the United States. This country is so vast and diverse that it’s hard to not want to explore every nook and cranny of it. And in the States, that means going on road trips - the cornerstone of American travel.
In 2013 I graduated college with a degree in creative writing with the intention to tell stories with the written word. What I ended up doing instead was immediately moving to Maine for the summer after graduation and not writing a single word of a novel or short story. Rather, I began living a story. And though that summer seemed brief, it instilled upon me the importance of seeing more of this country. I even recall, vividly, one of the first things I did after moving back to my home state of New York: looking up the “most dangerous” drives in the United States. Through that research I discovered routes such as the Hi-Line in Montana and the Dalton Highway in Alaska. Thus my wanderlust piqued.
I began feverishly looking at maps and plotting out road trips in New England, for starters; just finding all the classic highway drives and backroad jaunts to discover places yet, to me, unseen. Soon enough, I rented a car (a Toyota Corolla - that will be important later in this story), and set out on a solo four-day tour through urban Massachusetts, coastal Maine, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and the lush rural countryside of Vermont. This experience - just being on the road and stopping to see amazing sights and great breweries, even sleeping in my car in Wal-Mart parking lots - was unforgettable.
After purchasing my very own car - Carol, the 2013 Toyota Corolla - I’ve made several laps of New England in the past half dozen years, but the bigger drives began calling to me. Finally, in 2019, the stars aligned. I had pored over cross-country routes in the US, and really wanted to take a route across the northernmost states all the way to the west coast. A good friend had recently moved to Oregon, which meant I had some semblance of a final destination. With a final route and many locations plotted along the way to visit, I made my first two-week solo cross-country drive. And let me tell you: the story of that drive and all the sights I saw and experiences I had is unforgettable.
I began seeing life as a story, rather than writing a fiction which did not pertain to me. I photographed everything with my iPhone to preserve the tale of this drive. Naturally, in 2020, I made a second cross-country drive back to Oregon. This second run was a more southerly route which had me cruise through new states such as Colorado and Wyoming. The landscape around me was a canvas I photographed incessantly. The freedom of it all was something that New York - at least the part in which I lived - could never offer me.
In 2021 I made the permanent move, via a ten-day camping road trip with my parents and an RV, to Portland, Oregon. Exploration abound that summer as I took weekend day-trips all over the Pacific Northwest, from Mt. Rainier to Mt. Hood and beyond. My wanderlust, and the need to photograph everything I saw, ballooned.
So, where and why does the purchase of a DSLR camera fit into this story? The answer is simple: I didn’t want to just snap low-resolution iPhone images of locations throughout the US. I wanted to portray my newfound natural surroundings in a way which tells a story. The only way to do that was to pick up a camera and learn the craft.
Throughout 2022 I did just that. I learned how my camera sees, and how to make it see what I saw. I learned how to compose images and not just fire away at vistas with no thought process as to why I was taking said photos. Through research, numerous photography outings, and networking I was able to build a connection with my camera to finally do what I intended to do as early as 2013: tell a story.
This website will serve to showcase photographs and what they say. This will be more than Instagram; this will be my gallery to see my images the way they are meant to be seen.
This first image is a treasured one from 2022, perhaps my favorite photo from this year. The St. Johns Bridge is a fantastically photogenic old bridge in western Portland. I’ve visited this bridge and Cathedral Park, the park around it, several times. This particular photo I took when I traversed the bridge on foot. Once I reached the other side, I had to act quickly because this lone moped rider was about to turn onto the virtually empty bridge. And it was late golden hour. The timing and colors in this image speak so much to me. I love its framing and how the rider sits dead center in the frame, not even an inch off.
Of course, this image also speaks about a lone person setting out on a new, beautiful road. I love the primed kinetic energy of the rider’s positioning as he is about to traverse a bridge off into the horizon, to where, we know not.
