Intimate Portraits

Intimate Portraits is a project that captures the beauty of waterfalls by looking beyond their grandeur to the many intricate details within and around them. Extruded time captured the paths that water travels over and down rocks. Dark, wet canyons helped create active framing of the waterfalls. They also created unique challenges of keeping lenses dry and the camera still while standing in rushing water. The red and golden hues of the rocks were susceptible to dramatic colour temperature shifts as the sunlight changed throughout the day, making the sun’s angle critical to create visual unity throughout the project. The photographs required a considerable range of values to be captured, from intense sun-drenched white water to very dark shadow details of basalt rocks.

I am connected to water. I have been since birth. Born into a family of sailors, I spent my childhood and adolescence afloat. I respect and revere water. It is sustenance, power, and beauty. Water is the source of my inspiration for this project. The works of Ansel Adams, the photographer, and Thomas Moran, the painter, inspire me by how they used their art to protect our natural landscapes. Moran was pivotal to the protection of Yellowstone, and Adams worked through the Sierra Club to help create and conserve many of the current parks. They both excelled at capturing natural light, illuminating their subject matter’s beauty. By viewing this project, I hope that people will gain an appreciation for the beauty of these waterfalls and seek to preserve them from the impacts of man’s greed. I have brought the viewer from the outside forest and canyons into the intimate core of the falls, showing them how patterns repeat and how beauty exists at all vantage points.

These photographs were submitted as a project for my Master of Art in Photography at the University of Art in San Francisco.

All photographs were made using a Nikon Z7ii, NIKKOR Z 14-30mm f/4 S, Z 24-120mm f/4 S, Z 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 S Lenses, and Kase Revolution CPL, ND 8, 64, and 1000 filters.