2006-2012

 This week feels like it dragged on forever. It's exactly 7am Eastern time as I begin to write this post on Friday morning, so the week is still not over yet. Lately it feels like the weeks fly by but not this one. I suppose staying up late to watch the northern lights was not helpful in making this week feel like it is dragging less, but it was really exciting. Down here near Atlanta we almost never see them, so twice in one year feels especially magical.

We're lucky to live in an area that has very little light polution and it's easy to see the stars on any clear night. The aurora looked quite sinister through my Nikon camera, but was pretty pink, purple, and a splash of blue on my phone.

Recently I read some quotes from artists who felt that one couldn't be an artist and an illustrator, a point of view I've never understood. I've always tried to understand every art medium I could get my hands on and I think that everything I've tried has informed my abilities as an artist. Nature photography was one of my first real art-loves and I still love to get out with my camera and photograph nature's splendor.

When it comes to the aurora photos above it's not simply the shifting nature of the aurora that caused the different colors. I took pictures on both devices simultaneously, so at the same moment my phone captured pink/purple and my camera captured red. The difference is really just the ISO, or film speed. Lower ISOs require more light, or more time, to capture an image, and higher ISOs require less. At night with an ISO of 100, the camera MUST be on a tripod and the shutter is open for more than a minute, but the color is more saturated and the image of finer quality. Higher ISOs will yield more grain and you'll lose the tiny details like all of those little specs of stars.

I have not figured out how to record a video of the auroras yet, but when I move to Montana next year I'll have more opportunities to master that.

For now what I have done is finally finished adding all of my artwork to my Redbubble store!... all of my artwork from 2006-2012, anyway, with a few left out because I didn't like them or they were just too small to meet today's high-resolution printing standards. You can visit my Redbubble Shop if you want to see my old artwork. I'll start working on 2012-2018 next week, and eventually I'll get around to 2018-2024.