It’s always a pleasure to discover a new photography blog. Especially a really good one. It’s also a pleasure to pass it along to others.

I came across this one the other day. Wesley Picotte hails from Portland, Oregon and does some very fine wilderness photography. Not only that, he writes with the best of them. His posts are very strong, bold, and thoughtful… well worth reading and thinking about.

Rather than speak for him — he’s quite capable of doing that for himself — I’ll just send you over there to see for yourself. You’ll be glad you did.

In case you missed it, that’s Wesley Picotte Wilderness Photography.

Enjoy.

As I sat down here this morning, coffee in hand, I noticed that this will be post number 200 on photomontana.net. Not really many compared to a lot of blogs, but still… for me it’s a bit of a milestone. I seldom know what I’m going to say when I sit down here to do this. It’s been said, and attributed to a few different people, that writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down and stare at the keyboard until little drops of blood appear on your forehead. I go through that every time.

gibbon river sunrise

I’ve been thinking too that for someone who claims that photography is much like music, that it exists in a realm that goes beyond words, I sure do put out a lot of words about it. A contradiction? No. Not really…

Life is full of contradictions. The only way to avoid that is to lock yourself away… to shut yourself off from living… to fossilize. I don’t want to merely exist like that, so I’ll continue to contradict myself. I like to think that even though I’m a 60-something, I’m still growing and learning and changing.

When I first started a photography blog back in 2007 I really had no idea where I wanted to go with it or what I wanted to do with it. I wanted to show some new work of course, and thought I wanted to ‘talk shop’ with some other photographers. I soon found that I don’t really want to ‘talk shop’… I’d rather ‘talk life’.

I dumped that blog and started over with this one a little over two years ago. It’s both about photography and not about photography… another apparent contradiction. Photography is my chosen medium, but I’m not interested in cameras and lenses and various gadgets. I couldn’t care less about f-stops and shutter speeds, and never make note of any technical details like that. I’m more interested in life and experiences and thoughts and ideas. I use the camera to put that into visual form. Not in the sense of a visual diary, of here’s where I’ve been  what I’ve done what I’ve seen, but more in the sense of here’s something that struck a chord in me, that moved me to make a photograph of it. I can’t analyze it or explain it… it’s visual music, it lives outside of words.  Sometimes the song works, more often than not it doesn’t. Like I said…  I’m still learning.

After a couple hundred posts, this blog is slowly finding it’s way. It’s where I think out loud… where I can begin to flesh out where my photography comes from, why I do what I do, the living and experiencing behind it. Some of you are interested in this, many more no doubt stumble across it, stifle a yawn, and move on. That’s alright. This blog is what it is, and it will be what it will be. All I can say for sure is that it will continue to change, hopefully grow, and likely contradict itself any number of times through all that.

So stick around. I appreciate all the thoughts and ideas you bring here. We’ll see where the next 200 take us… I hope I can occasionally give you something to think about and chew on.

pj