Starting Somewhere...

January 12, 2024

Every story has a first word, every journey a starting place

I was never really sure what I wanted to do with my life.  To be honest, the prospect of a career always seemed a bit out of touch for me.  I wasn't sure what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I had a lot of ideas, though.  Some of those included grandiose child-like dreams of being an astronaut and going to space.  Or, later as a teenager who discovered theater, an actor or tech crew perhaps. None of these were meant to be, however.  I grew up in a fly-over state.  On a "farm" if you could call it that.  More like a desert ranch.  There weren't very many people, opportunities, ideas, or access to culture or internet yet at that time.

I grew up on a farm between Pueblo and La Junta in the lower Arkansas Valley, about 15 miles from our nearest small town of about 1,500 people.  My graduating class was around 30, but I didn't graduate with them.

I wasn't exactly raised in a healthy household...

In my early 20s, I found myself floundering through my junior year of college.  I couldn't make a decision on what I wanted to do.  My love for science and the arts were in complete conflict, and my personal life had brought up a lot of barriers to successfully evaluating that for myself.  Throughout high school, I was being groomed and assaulted by an older man in his 70s.  He was a "step-grandfather" of sorts, as my mother married his daughter when I was in 10th grade.  This continued until I had started college.  I eventually started therapy, reported the abuse that was happening, and endured a very long and drawn out legal battle in which I was defamed and details about me were published in local newspapers even though my identity should have remained protected at the time due to me being underage.

After that court battle, which lasted for more than a year, the perpetrator of those crimes was murdered.  

Granted, while I had nothing to do with that and it came as a complete shock to me, it was still extremely impactful.  In the end, it completely derailed my plans for school, my mental health, and my sense of self.  I spent the better part of the following decade during my 20s living with my newly adopted Dad after spending the last few years of my childhood in foster care.  He took amazing care of me and has continuously helped me to heal and reach my potential.  During those years, I spent a lot of time continuing to learn about some of my favorite sciences and arts.  Having always been an avid fan of space and photography, I started to dabble with one and then the other.  

I've been taking pictures as a hobby without the proper tools to hone that skill for a decade now

That isn't to say I didn't do anything during that time.  I took photos, learned to paint and draw better, learned more about the visual arts and volunteered for my community theater.  I played the Baritone, or Euphonium as it is known by some, for my local community band.  I continued to learn as much information about the world and the subjects I was interested in as possible.  

And I also ran a Bed and Breakfast.

This photo was taken at my Dad's house on May 29, 2015.  At the time, my only camera was a .5mp I had on my StraightTalk burner phone.  Even still, I would sit and fiddle with settings for what seemed like hours in order to get the lighting and exposure right for this shot.

Those years of rest and learning were necessary for me to survive and even more necessary if I will ever start to thrive.

I took a lot of pictures in those ten years, but it was almost always with my phone camera.  For a very long time, I could afford a phone, but not a dedicated camera in addition to it.  This highly limited my camera settings and what kinds of pictures I could get for the better part of those ten years. Quite quickly, the availability of higher quality cameras and settings on phones opened the way for me to take better and better photos.

To make a very long story much shorter

Fast forward through years of photography being nothing more than a very storage-heavy hobby of mine, and we reach the 2020s.  COVID happened, it's been awful for everyone, and I'm not going to dwell on that here.  But it did provide an opportunity for my wife and I.  (Oh yeah, in that fast forward I met an amazing human being who I live with and share my life with, she's amazing).  We moved from the barren plains of Southeastern Colorado up to the city of Denver.  That move was about 120 miles or so.  The next closest population center that large would be roughly four times that distance, so it was a huge opportunity for us.  

I had already been streaming on Twitch, but I upped my game during the pandemic

I switched to Vtubing, where I used a 2d avatar and facial tracking in place of showing my face on stream.  And in the process of increasing the quality of my stream to match the amazing model I had commissioned, I learned so much about post-processing and digital art.

My early dives into some YouTube videos taught me so much about how to use the post-processing tools I would later be using for more serious photography.  I never did stick with making YouTube videos.  The editing process for most of my content was so time consuming that it wasn't worth it to me.  But I still love livestreaming and my real love for the editing process came through in the photography side.

So, why not revisit some of my old work?

And that's exactly what I've started to do.  I've been going back to my old photos from the crappy burner phones and the early attempts at this hobby, finally putting a few of them through some post.  For some almost 8 or 9 years after they were taken.  

For some other work, I've been using the newer Samsung phone cameras.  My work for the last several years has been based on the flagship Samsung sensors and trifecta of lenses.  This sunrise photo, which I've named "Urban Morning" for prints, was taken this year on my 50mp sensor of my Fold 4.

And finally, in November of 2024, I bought a dedicated DSLR

A Canon Rebel SL3.  I haven't had much of a chance to use it yet, but I have had a lot of fun playing around with it.  The first thing I started to acquire were my lenses.  At the moment, my Dad has very graciously gifted me a 10-18mm wide angle, and I am borrowing an 18-55mm and a 100-300mm from my partner and friend.  

Oh yeah, I may not have mentioned, but I'm also polyamorous.  I'm transgender, too!  I have all kinds of fun little facts up my sleeve!

But the very first thing I wanted to use it for was

Jupiter and 2 of its moons. I took this with my Canon SL3 and a 300mm telephoto on a tripod.

Astrophotography, of course

I still can't believe it has taken me so long to realize such a simple solution was staring me right in the face.  The marriage of my two passions is clearly a genre that already exists.  Photography is something I can do anytime, anywhere.  But the real joy is going to come from looking up.  

A few years after my Dad retired from 35 years of teaching where I attended high school, we were fortunate enough to be gifted a telescope that had been owned by the school.  The school hadn't used it in more than a decade, and they were downsizing to move to a new building in 2024.  The telescope we inherited, a Celestron 10" with an equatorial tracking mount, is perfect for getting started.  I haven't had the opportunity to use it to capture any images yet.  At the moment I have been refamiliarizing myself with its electronics and how to use it and care for it properly.  I will have blog posts for every viewing night with the telescope posted here on the website.  

Thank you for reading this first blog.  It's a short little introduction to who I am and what I am doing here.  If you've made it this far and like what you see, please consider supporting me.  You can click some of the social links that are about on the website, look through some examples of my work on my Instagram and on the Portfolio section of my website, fill out the contact form to hire me for a project, buy my prints through my shop, or check out my other non-photography related projects!  My cat has her own TikTok, and I'm sure we will be doing a blog post about that at some point too.  I'm keeping this blog focused on photography, but as I plan to use it a bit more as a diary of what I'm working on, my other projects will inevitably spill over to here from time to time.  Thank you again for reading!  Until the next time, my friends!