Simple Pleasures by TjThorne

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I am going through the process of selling my house and moving my life (I am staying in the Portland area) and with that comes something that I’ve been thinking about more and more: simplification.

I don’t have a problem with the simplification. There are a lot of things that I have that I don’t need and I’m fine with getting rid of those. Many times during this moving phase I’ve come across something that I haven’t looked at or touched since I unpacked it when I moved in. And before that the last time was when I packed it up at a previous residence. I just keep moving these things back and forth across the country. For what?

Sometimes it’s a practical thing. Sure I can get rid of EVERYTHING I own but I will need something to sit on wherever I end up. I will need a table and plates for my son and I to eat dinner on. I will need my tools for fixing my car, building a clubhouse, or general maintenance.

I often struggle with the decision to keep these higher ticket or practical items but then there are the things that help me create experiences: photo equipment, my music player for road trips, backpacking equipment, my hockey equipment, skateboard, snowboard, etc. These things feel more important to me than the practical things and they should; They are contributing to experiences and memories. These are things I will keep. That’s a no brainer.

And now the next rung on the way up the ladder for me: keepsakes. These are the things that help jog my memory or items that have been passed down to me as family heirlooms: framed photos of ancestors, my grandfather’s trumpet, an iron door stopper in the shape of a frog that I LOVED seeing at my grandparents’ house as a kid, hair from my son’s first haircut, his first tooth lost, etc. Seemingly, these should be a no-brainer “KEEP THEM” moment. But they’re not. I struggle with this. They are still just ‘things’. They just happen to be things that remind me of specific times, places, and people. Are those times, places, and people any less a part of my being without the ‘things’ that remind me? Is carrying around these items worth the couple times in my life that they will get me to stop and think of that one specific moment? Will letting these things go erode the importance of their meaning? Will the things that are a part of me deep down go away when I don’t have an item to recall them? This is a hard decision for me.

I think what it comes down to for me right now is enriching my life. I want to live in a way where my priorities are creating experiences for myself and the people I care about. I figure the more of those that are created, the more we have to fall back on in memory, and the more full our hearts and souls will be. The things tie me down. They’re addictive. They make me compromise in ways that I shouldn’t so that I can afford a place to keep them. I surround myself with them, afraid of letting go, afraid that I will lose a part of myself.

In February of 2015 my friends Erin Babnik, Ted Gore, and I went on a trip that I will never forget for many reasons. The way that trip made me feel and the life reflections it brought are things that are now a part of me. I realized many things in that desert. Extended time out in nature helps me get down to the nuts and bolts of life and teaches me where I need to apply some focus. There’s simplicity in being in the middle of nowhere. It came down to spending time with people I care about, laughing, sitting in silence, eating together, walking together, and just simply living life. This is a photo of Ted soaking up some of that pleasure.

Thanks for reading.

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Hope by TjThorne

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This is an interesting image for me, and kind of an optical illusion. The photo as you see it is from the orientation in which I was standing as I took the photograph. As I looked toward my feet, the wind and water scoured sandstone scooped up the warm, early morning sunlight. I had originally processed this file with the intention of displaying it upside down (Click here to see), but after running it by my friends I have decided to present it as I had taken it.

It had been a cold night in the desert. The hike from camp to our location and the pitch black scouting before sunrise did little to warm the body. It’s an odd feeling to be wearing a coat, gloves and a warm hat and to look towards the horizon to see the heat rising off the desert floor. It’s a time of transition and before you know it, you are shedding layers until you are in shorts and a t-shirt basking in the sun.

The reason I wanted to release it upside down was because it felt more abstract. When looking at it that way, my mind struggled to make sense of the photo. It’s not tangible to me. It’s confusing because the light part of the sandstone seems closer to the camera than the darker parts. I enjoyed the optical illusion aspect. Deep down I found a parallel between the image and some struggles in life. The darkness at the top is holding in and smothering the light. There’s tension in that situation. Seeing the image this way gave me a little bit of comfort in the discomfort.

Yet upon rotating the image 180 degrees a new world is opened up. Light floods into the darkness from the top. There’s stability. There’s sense. There’s warmth. There’s hope.

Ultimately, it’s those aspects of life that I really need to hold dear right now. And just like that warm sunlight piercing the cold and watching the heat on the horizon when I took the photo, I should look for that warmth in the trying times of life and use them as inspiration rather than accepting and getting used to the discomfort. It’s all the same photo, it just depends on how we are looking at it.

What do you think? Do you prefer it this way or the other way? Why?

Thanks for reading. 🙂

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Hope by TjThorne

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This is an interesting image for me, and kind of an optical illusion. The photo as you see it is from the orientation in which I was standing as I took the photograph. As I looked toward my feet, the wind and water scoured sandstone scooped up the warm, early morning sunlight. I had originally processed this file with the intention of displaying it upside down (Click here to see), but after running it by my friends I have decided to present it as I had taken it.

It had been a cold night in the desert. The hike from camp to our location and the pitch black scouting before sunrise did little to warm the body. It’s an odd feeling to be wearing a coat, gloves and a warm hat and to look towards the horizon to see the heat rising off the desert floor. It’s a time of transition and before you know it, you are shedding layers until you are in shorts and a t-shirt basking in the sun.

The reason I wanted to release it upside down was because it felt more abstract. When looking at it that way, my mind struggled to make sense of the photo. It’s not tangible to me. It’s confusing because the light part of the sandstone seems closer to the camera than the darker parts. I enjoyed the optical illusion aspect. Deep down I found a parallel between the image and some struggles in life. The darkness at the top is holding in and smothering the light. There’s tension in that situation. Seeing the image this way gave me a little bit of comfort in the discomfort.

Yet upon rotating the image 180 degrees a new world is opened up. Light floods into the darkness from the top. There’s stability. There’s sense. There’s warmth. There’s hope.

Ultimately, it’s those aspects of life that I really need to hold dear right now. And just like that warm sunlight piercing the cold and watching the heat on the horizon when I took the photo, I should look for that warmth in the trying times of life and use them as inspiration rather than accepting and getting used to the discomfort. It’s all the same photo, it just depends on how we are looking at it.

What do you think? Do you prefer it this way or the other way? Why?

Thanks for reading. 🙂

via 500px http://ift.tt/1WeY6Yr

Limited by TjThorne

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I had been listening to a song recently, one that I have been listening to for almost 20 years now. At the beginning of the track they have a sample from the movie ‘The Sheltering Sky’:

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

Chew on that for a bit.

I think often about how much of life is.. forgettable. And I don’t really mean it in a bad way. I just mean.. it’s life, ya know? Driving here and there, standing in lines, sitting on our couch, on our computers, on-the-clock at your day job, and just….. bleh.

I also think sometimes about how awesome.. and scary it would be to be able to retrieve ANY statistic about your life:
How many pounds of ice cream have I eaten in my life?
How many times have I sneezed?
How much money have I spent in my whole life?
How many hours have I spent browsing Facebook?
How many hours have I used the restroom on-the-job? (Quick do some math to find out approximately how much money I’ve been paid to use the restroom…)

Or….

How many times have I told my son I loved him?
How many times have I clicked a camera shutter?
How many times have I felt at home?
How many hikes have I been on?
How many leaves have I touched?
How many streams have I stepped in?

That’s my thing about landscape and nature photography: It helps me remember. I have been to Abiqua falls more times than I can count. But I remember two excursions the most. I remember the feelings.. both physical and emotional. I remember who I was with and the journeys on the way. And I remember those experiences so profoundly because I came back with a photo.

Super special internet high-five if you know the song I’m talking about. 🙂

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Remember by TjThorne

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This is about a friend who left us way too early. This is for Jeff Swanson.

I am often surprised by how quickly I have formed deep friendships with some people in the landscape photography community. I have met numerous people in the past three years that have had a profound impact on not only my photography, but my life and the way that I think about the world. I am invigorated by the generosity and support that has come my way, and the memories and experiences that have been forged because of it. My friends have truly been a beacon of hope in some pretty trying times. They tighten my grip. They boost me up so that I can continue to keep my eye on the shore while I tread the waves of life and try to make it to dry land.

Jeff was one of those people. While I had only known Jeff for a short time, I felt a deep connection to him. Our friendship formed online over photography. Our shared passion for both photography and cheesy humor resulted in some pretty long threads where we traded bad puns and had a blast doing it. Jeff’s positivity and outlook were contagious and he pulled many people into that circle. I know I’m not the only one who had been impacted in a positive way by this dude over words on a screen.

I had the luxury of meeting Jeff in the Bay Area when he and another friend (who is now one of my best friends) came to support me for my first gallery show. I battle myself a lot on my creativity and my art. So to have two people I only knew online get in their car and drive somewhere to show their support for me really hit me. I’m sure they were enticed by the free wine and cookies at the opening reception, but I try to ignore that part.

The thing is… it never felt weird or awkward. I’m good at faking it but most times I don’t feel comfortable in social settings with a bunch of people I don’t know, and one of those settings where I am at the center of focus is even worse. I can’t explain the excitement I felt when I saw my two friends standing there. In that moment our friendship had grown immensely. I felt more comfortable in that big white room. I laughed genuinely instead of nervously. It felt like I had known them for years instead of months. The next day the three of us shared a photographic memory on Hawk Hill shooting the Golden Gate Bridge. While that kind of photography isn’t necessarily my jam, standing on the side of a hill with two people I enjoy, watching the weather move around us, experiencing that moment, laughing, talking, and using our cameras while the sun dipped below the horizon totally is.

That’s the kind of person Jeff was to me and I find it weird that I was affected by his death in the way that I was. But it made sense. He was a good person and he exuded that energy. I know everyone says good things about someone when they pass.. but from my experience.. it’s all true about Jeff.

I’m glad that I got to spend several more days creating memories and photographing nature with Jeff when he came to visit Oregon in the spring of 2014. I knew he was sick.. but I didn’t know that would be the last time I saw him.

I hope that he knew what kind of impact he had on people. I never got a chance to tell him.

To all of my friends reading this.. I love you.

————————————

Jeff passed at the young age of 30 due to complications from Melanoma. I encourage you to visit and donate to the Melanoma Research Foundation. You can also view some of his photography at a memorial website that has been donated by Smugmug by clicking his link: http://ift.tt/1Kmy8QL. All proceeds from prints sold will be donated to the Melanoma Research Foundation in Jeff’s name. Every little bit helps. So far over $4,000 has been raised through this site.

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To Live is to Fly by TjThorne

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This is the third image from my Artist-in-Residency appointment at Crater Lake National Park in October of 2014.

Taken from the very top of Hillman Peak, this panorama is a shot that I was determined to get during my residency. No matter how busy the park had gotten, I always found myself alone up here and seemingly.. alone in the whole park. It’s by far one of the best and least visited views of the lake.

My two week stay was dominated by clear blue skies. And while the weather was beautiful for swinging in a hammock, relaxing, and taking in the view, it left me unfulfilled in terms of my photographic desires. Time and time again I would make the hike to the top of Hillman Peak with my gear (including camping gear because I never knew if I was going to spend the night up there) and get shut down by any kind of desirable light or conditions. I’m not complaining. I mean, how could I complain about getting to watch sunset after sunset from this vantage? The fact that I had two whole weeks to do as I pleased, away from responsibilities, in a place as magical as Crater Lake is something that I will always be extremely grateful for. This experience would have never happened if I didn’t have the support of my friends and family, the encouragement from the photography community, and of course the honor of being selected by the National Park Service to be one of four artists brought into the program. I’m a pretty lucky guy sometimes.

But that’s not to say there wasn’t frustration. I was, after all, expected to produce art during my stay. I had never had expectations around my art put upon me until then. Not only did I want to produce art that fell in line with the program’s focus, but I also wanted to produce pieces that originated more from my love for photography and nature… something personal to me and something that I could use to convey the wonder and appreciation that I feel for life in nature.

That brings me to this night. I made the steep climb to the top of Hillman Peak for the eigth time with not a cloud in sight in my shooting direction. My expectations for a shot I would like were pretty low. But I got there early enough to relax, let the sweat dry from my brow, feel the breeze blow through my shirt, and witness the shadows fall across the lake once again. I had a wall of clouds to the west, and so the chance of nice light hitting the rim was nonexistent. And there I sat, frequently looking back to see if there would be a break in that wall of clouds, but it was not to be. The minutes passed and those clouds drew closer. Soon enough, they were at my back and I watched them spill over the rim into the caldera. I was enveloped in the quickly moving atmosphere and it was the first time during my residency that everything I had been waiting for bubbled to the surface. Maybe not the light that I was expecting.. but what I wanted was to feel alive. Not relaxed.. but ALIVE. All of those frustrations were whisked away by the elements and I shot away with a huge smile on my face. The excitement of living filled me to the brim and I couldn’t help but let out a ‘wooooooo!’ at the top of my lungs. The sound echoed through the park and I have no doubt that if you were standing on the rim of Crater Lake on October 14th, 2014 that you heard it. But up here in the fog with my camera and my goosebumps.. I was the only man on earth.

This shot epitomizes so much about my personal experience during the residency. It might not be a shot that fits within the program focus, but it’s the crown jewel of my stay. I hope that you can experience a little of what I felt when looking at this photo.

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