The Open Plain
We spend an inordinate amount of our lives acting as the gatekeepers of our own minds, treating every stray thought, anxious whisper, and unsolicited mental image as a personal failure or an accurate reflection of who we are. When a heavy or jarring thought enters the consciousness, the instinctive reaction is to clamp down, to interrogate it, or to wage an exhausting internal war trying to evict it. We assume that because a thought happens inside our own head, it must belong to us, defining our character, our stability, or our worth.
The Courage of Boredom
In an era defined by hyper-connectivity and the relentless pursuit of stimulation, boredom has been rebranded as a pathology. We treat a moment of stillness as a malfunction in our productivity, immediately reaching for a screen to fill the “void.” Yet, there is a profound, often overlooked bravery required to sit with one's own mind in the absence of external input. To embrace boredom is not merely to endure a lack of entertainment; it is an act of reclaiming the sovereignty of our own consciousness.
No Fuss
Great art needs no fuss. Just make art.
Digital Workflow
It’s my digital workflow, simple yet accurate. I treat the sensor like a raw, neutral canvas.
The Worker and The Observer
In a world that demands we constantly act as the architects of order — managing, regulating, and shielding the machinery of our daily lives — we rarely get to just be. We are almost always “on,” performing our roles within high-friction systems that require us to be the barrier between chaos and function. Because of this, the value of a place like the Odessa Stonehenge isn’t just in what it is; it’s in what it doesn’t ask of us.
A Little Gravel on Both Sides
There is a quiet war on the printed page between the people who run their words right up against a long dash — jamming the thoughts together like traffic — and the people who leave a little room on either side.
Why 4x5 Belongs to Black & White
There is a point where the friction of a medium stops being a productive challenge and just becomes a drag. That’s color film on 4x5. When you factor in the sheer cost per sheet, the dwindling number of labs willing to touch large-format E-6 or C-41, and the absolute headache of keeping a massive piece of plastic free of dust on a scanner bed, the math stops working. It kills the momentum. With 135 and 120, you can actually drop the rolls off, let the lab handle the heavy lifting, and keep moving. Roll film gives you the room to shoot, to observe, and to finish a thought without every click of the shutter feeling like a major financial and logistical calculation.
Salvage Documentary
There is a distinct category of things — fading neon, vernacular storefronts, the quiet geometry of abandoned buildings — that carries no grand architectural pedigree but holds the exact texture of a specific time and place. The impulse to photograph them isn’t about fighting progress or drowning in nostalgia; new growth has its own utility. It is simply a matter of respecting the evidence. These structures are the physical receipts of everyday human ambition, and recording them precisely before they pull a disappearing act is just basic stewardship. It’s leaving a straight, honest document that says: this is exactly how it stood.
The Flat Baseline: Portra 160 on Noritsu
There’s a quiet, unvarnished utility to pairing Portra 160 with a Noritsu scan. While a lot of people chase the Fuji Frontier for its heavy, golden-hour punch and compressed blacks, that look can easily slip into a kind of manufactured drama. The Noritsu takes a completely different path. It doesn't try to force a style onto the frame; instead, it hands you a clean, flat, open baseline. Because the algorithm refuses to crush the shadows, you’re left with a soft black point and a beautifully wide dynamic range that serves as the ultimate digital negative. It records the environment exactly as it stands, keeping the tones airy and the light completely honest.
Spatial Facts
The transition from recognizing a subject to perceiving a frame is where photography becomes an act of pure presence. When a picture refuses to organize itself around a central point of interest, it strips away the manufactured drama of a traditional narrative. Instead, it forces an intersection with the physical reality of the environment exactly as it stands. Forms, textures, arrangements, and light are no longer just details supporting a main subject; they become the subject itself.
The Last Time for the First Time
The last time for the last time means there was a last time for the first time too. If you trace it back, finality isn’t a single sharp drop; it’s a rhythm that eventually runs out of steam. We use the phrase “for the last time” to draw a hard line in the dirt, to signal an ending or a boundary that we swear is permanent. But the moment you find yourself staring at the actual, definitive end — the last time for the last time — you realize that closure has its own history. It means that somewhere in the past, there was a first time you thought a door was shut, only for the hinges to give way again later.
Architectural Photography
If you can’t shoot a building with a 24mm or a 50mm, it doesn’t want its picture taken. There is a point where you have to stop fighting the environment and just listen to what the street is telling you. If a 24mm can’t pull back wide enough to hold the context of a structure, or a 50mm can’t isolate the flat utility of its geometry, you’re usually trying to force a perspective that doesn’t exist. You’re either trapped by the physical limits of the block or trying to inject a manufactured drama into a space that doesn’t want it. Some structures are meant to be documented exactly as they stand — unvarnished and quiet — and if they don't fit into those two focal lengths, they might just be telling you to leave them alone.
The Serious Business of Play
We often mistake seriousness for importance, treating our work, our learning, and our creative pursuits as rigid obligations. But when we strip away the room to laugh, we also strip away the room to discover.
On Common Ground
People aren’t actually as far apart as it seems; we are just staring at the world through different windows from different daily routines. Sometimes we are flying over, looking down from 30,000 feet above places like the Midway Drive-in Theater, where the marquee advertises its location between Turkey and Quitaque—fittingly, a midpoint between New York and Los Angeles.
Ambient Light Meter
An ambient light meter may help your photography more than a new camera. A new sensor might give you a cleaner file at some extreme ISO or a few extra megapixels to crop into, but it doesn't change how you actually evaluate a landscape. A new camera usually just changes the interface; it doesn't change your relationship with the sun. When you rely entirely on an internal reflective meter, you’re letting a computer guess based on whatever it's looking at. If you’re framing an old brick building against a blazing West Texas sky or working around high-contrast industrial metal, that internal meter gets tricked. It tries to average everything out, and you end up fighting the camera's guesswork before you even press the shutter.
Findings
In a desktop browser with site navigation, a black-and-white picture of a city shows buildings and old cars, accompanied by descriptive text. The picture brings a little something from the past back to life. In it, I see fragments, details, and things long replaced. I’m grateful someone stood there and recorded it for posterity, and more than a two-dimensional time capsule, it’s a template for making new pictures.
From Newsprint to the Artist’s Zine
How do newspapers still hit newsstands post-2025? A broadsheet with morning coffee was once a daily ritual.
Shoulder to Shoulder and Different
To hold a belief deeply while remaining open to the world is to understand that our personal worldview is never a universal law, but simply a unique set of coordinates on an infinitely expanding sphere. The moment we treat our subjective perspective as an absolute truth, our thinking becomes rigid and clumsy, forcing the world into narrow, artificial categories instead of meeting it as it is. True humility lies in recognizing that our thoughts and creative spaces are vital practices, yet they are not the end-all, be-all—they are merely open windows to a much larger, interconnected reality.
Today
A simple note. If there’s something you want to do, do it today, not tomorrow, not five years from now. Do it today. This is it. This short moment is all anyone gets. Spend your time wisely. Work wisely.
So far apart
Odessa makes the most sense in a car on Grant Avenue at night listening to Only the Lonely.