A trip around the US // Travel Photographer

This post starts with a song because this song played at the most perfect moment of this trip. Please play it and enjoy.

A fiddle plays as the dusk falls, behind us the dust kicking up behind the car and in front the flat plains of Texas. The colours around swirl with warmth and glow like they’re being painted just for us. There is an amazing and deep peace in this moment, this moment is why we exist on this earth, a perfect mix of sound and wonder. We create such beauty, such moving art. Sometimes I wonder what we’re all arguing about when moments like this exist. This is how I define the divine. The moments that transcend the mundane and become perfect in their simplicity. Driving towards the artists oasis of Marfa at dusk. I may have cried. My heart full from the beauty and experiencing this moment with my love.

The previous week had already been the perfect storm of love, catching up with old friends for the wedding of two of my favourite people, Brit & Sam. They met through an online forum that a trusty cohort of my fellow wedding photographers had met on. Living on all different sides of the globe, we rarely get to see each other. Experiencing the love and joy of seeing everyone, combined with witnessing two of our friends get married, there were many happy tears on this trip. I took one camera, my Contax RX, one lens, a Zeiss 50mm f1.4 (for the camera nerds out there). Two film stocks, a Portra 160, and an Across 100 (full disclosure I ran out of film about halfway through and forgot to buy some before we left so some of this is shot on a random roll from Walmart – and a shoutout to Walmart having film even in their store in the middle of nowhere Texas).

Shooting film has been such a beautiful way to experience the joy of travel without thinking about the work, the photos, whether something’s absolutely perfect, should I take another shot just in case? Maybe someone blinked and I won’t have gotten it. Was it slightly crooked? Without thinking about all of those things, without dwelling on the image itself, but rather thinking about the experience. My goal, what I had wanted from this trip was a kind of photographic reset, to think about the trip that Nick and I were taking, seeing friends and just documenting the things we saw and the moments that struck me.

There’s a joy found in wandering, not having a plan and for the first time in 6 years, we traveled without one. These images are just a touch of our journey, from the mountains to the valleys, to the laundromats. I hope you enjoy them.