About Me

I've spent my whole life in the Pacific Northwest. I'm most comfortable in our autumn rain, either walking through it in the woods or listening to it through my open bedroom window with a London Fog from scratch. When I opt for my room, I spend a lot of time browsing the web. Growing up, we had one of those see-through Macs. It was replaced by a different Mac desktop later on. I knew young that computers could be tools for art. My father taught graphic design and illustrated Captain Bug, the main character of my favorite bedtime story, on the living room computer.

My first "real" online experience was with Tumblr where I still maintain a blog. I learned how to code there, first when it still supported markdown and then building my own theme. I've picked up some other tricks since then. What pushed me to make my own site was the appeal of creative flexibility that Tumblr doesn't support. It's nice to have my own space.

We were a single-income household until I was about six. A teaching salary didn't keep us from eating, but it didn't leave us a lot of options. Once a year, my family would pack for a week and drive the 530-odd miles from our home in Seattle to an inn outside Yachats owned by a family friend. The room would was discounted and the entertainment provided by the ever-changing Oregon beach never wore off. I'd snap dozens of pictures on the red and blue plastic camera I had. Pictures of anything; the sand, the sea, broken fragments of California mussel shells. The tide brought starfish in one morning, hundreds of them, and when it rolled out it left them clinging to every stone and boulder the back had. They were gone the next day.

The open-air mall near us used to have a Kodak storefront, I think. We would go down there, my mom and I, to have my photos developed. Those photos live in a box in a bedroom somewhere. Both my parents mastered in photography. Since I was little, there was a camera in my hand. After my film camera was broken or lost (or perhaps my parents simply didn't want to keep buying film), I was upgraded to a drugstore digital. It was a Canon PowerShot A480 with a red body (many thanks to my mom for expertly locating it among our mid-renovation home!). I carried that camera with me from Yachats to Rochester and back. It was serious business fiddling with the (limited) settings for the perfect shot.

My mom started working around the time I started Kindergarten at age six. We had more money. In March of 2016, we packed for three weeks instead of one and got on a flight to Reykjavik. That red camera and my red iPod 3 were how I photographed my way through western Iceland. The water there tastes and smells of sulfur. Had I been older than thirteen and not on my period half the trip, I think I would have gotten more out of it than a few words of Icelandic and photos I don't remember taking. I'm lucky to have gone, and I want to go again sometimes, now that I've had time to grow up. That summer we went back to New York.

The best part of being in Rochester was the rainstorms. We went to visit my grandfather in his home in Penfield. It was an old two-story that would shake at every clap of thunder with a dozen more like it in the surrounding few miles before you hit farmland. When it wasn't thundering, I could run outside barefoot in my denim jumper with my hair down. The cement would be hot and dusty under my feet and the grass would be cold and sticky until the rain washed both off my skin. I loved the dark sky and static on the breeze. Grandpa died in the hospital when I was 14. My favorite photo of him was taken a few years prior at my uncles house. He's sitting in a plastic lawn chair in a polo and khakis and a huge, pink tissue paper flower balanced on his bald head. He's smiling.

Back home, it rains a lot. About half the days in the year, depending on where in Seattle you are (it rains more in my neighborhood than downtown). Sometimes it's so light it's more like fog than rain, and sometimes it comes down so hard I can't see across the street from my bedroom window, like fuzz on an electronic display. I don't mind getting wet, even in November when my fingers freeze and my sneakers soak through. We haven't been back to Rochester since Grandpa died.

My third camera was a mid-aughts, second-hand Canon G10 from my father. It was a step up with control over the shutter speed and more modes to play with. This is where things got interesting, photography-wise at least. I used it for a number of years, gradually getting more selective about how and what I shot. There's photos of people I love and loved on its chip and even more photos of plants or views or dead birds that caught my eye.

This was the time in my life when I was growing up in a different way. Coming out of COVID lockdowns, I'd made my own friends. I was going out with them, or swimming in the lake alone, and was starting to learn how to drive. It's a blurry few years with not a lot of landmarks in time. I listened to a lot of music. I read a lot of comics. More than once, I went out into the woods. I took photos. "Photography is about seeing what's important to you," my mom said once. Eventually, I turned the lens up.

Just about every profound thing there is to say about space has already been said more eloquently than I could. What made late nights on my front porch fiddling with the zoom different? I suppose it felt like a patch of sky that was mine. Scattered around the United States and the world are dark sites, where the sky at night is free of light pollution and you can see the stars— all of them. The first time I really saw the sky at night was on the Oregon coast in a vacation rental where I'd taken the master bedroom. The milky way spilled across the sky and past where I could crane my neck far enough to see it. My front porch is far from a dark site. The streetlamps bleed in and our neighbors on either side have security lights triggered by every wayward squirrel. Being on the flight path means planes overhead every few minutes, and that's not counting the light from the house. But I get some good photos, or photos I think are good for now.

The last time I was on the Oregon coast, I was in the passenger seat of my friend's Infinity G35. We drove north then west through the Tillamook National Forest and up Highway 101. We stopped at a beach, per my request. Clinging to the rocks as the tide rolled out were dozens of starfish. I'll go back sometime soon, probably with my camera around my neck. I shoot on a Nikon D7500 with a Sigma 17-70 lens now. When I asked for a new camera for my 21st birthday, I refused to budge on a DSLR. It's a $1300 configuration, and when I "grow out" of it the price tag will only go up. But so will the distance I can travel and, hopefully, the time I spend in this wonderful part of the world.