Reflective Layering: Winter

Lake Chelan, WA – New Years 2023 © Cameron Karsten Photography

I think about seasons as temporary transformations of emotion, physicality and the obvious surrounding environs. To me, winter is dark, cold, unforgiving, and often turbulent. A time of rest, thick socks, hot wood-burning stoves, and dark beers to ease my moodier outlook of the external world. Being from the Pacific Northwest, winter is more or less all those things, but milder with intermittent wind storms and snow that lasts a day or two before melting into a brown slushy soup that you can’t help but wish away sooner rather than later. Back to the rain.

However, as a father with two daughters, it is a season of new adventures and explorations. Getting the young outside to discover is no easy task. The layering, the timing, the coaxing with gallons of hot chocolate… It is never for naught, but an opportunity to expand the horizons and see the new; the soft tones of grays, whites, blacks and muted greens, with the occasional shocking blues. And it is a time to go within, to be still and watch the passing clouds and the water drops fall from the eves. In the PNW the sun is forever low on the winter horizon, if it appears at all, and the shadows always long, creating the ever contrasted frames of intrigue. Wherever you look, there is a place to go and train your eye.

I love when the light pierces through the canopy. I love when patterns and symmetry line up. I love when a tree stands out, tall like a monolith, a representation of the ages still strong, still remaining, like a wise sage oblivious to it all. I love when it all comes crashing down: When the light is flat and the waters still. When the forms shatter and chaos creates the creative imagination. When there is busy-ness infused with light and darkness. I think this is what makes the world go round, the brain taking in all the senses every waking hour and the heart making sense of it all through one simple thing – a feeling.

“To examine oneself makes good use of sight.” – Chuang Tzu

Mammoth Lakes, CA – 2022-2023 winter’s historic season, one atmospheric river after another. © Cameron Karsten Photography

This is my winter monologue; an exposé of images, thoughts, examinations, feelings and wonderment. It is a time of cabin fevers and extreme endurance. A place of stillness and wild abandon, often digging deep to remain true to oneself or simply to remain alive per the elements. All outcomes are a possibility.

CAMERON KARSTEN PHOTOGRAPHY

Active, Lifestyle, Portrait | Photographer + Director

Represented by The Gren Group | SEATTLE • LA

www.CameronKarsten.com | 206.605.9663

How to Shred the Gnar

There’s a first for everything, and as a primary water sports enthusiast, I haven’t introduced my kids to the art of snow sports yet, until the 1st of 2023! They have begun their journey Shreddin’ the Gnar. But first a look at the hills shrouded in snow just south of Chelan, WA. This edition is available for purchase up to 50in x 19in showcased over a beautiful wall space. Contact for details.

We spent two days at Echo Valley just north of Lake Chelan. With only 3 toe ropes and a minimal field of Jerry’s, their experience was beautiful. After an 1.5hr ski lesson from a young shredder himself, they were hooked.

http://www.CameronKarsten.com

A Day For Ice

For one day in the Pacific Northwest, everything frozen.

Looking at my Tacoma was a detailed spectacle.

From the truck, I grabbed a sheet of black foam core and wandered around the garden.

Placing the black background behind the frozen elements helped isolate the subjects and make the ice pop.

Then with an old camera, and an even older lens, I returned to the truck to photograph the macro world of ice encapsulating the Toyota Tacoma.

They each look like a study of ice, or a picture of a frozen planet far out in the galaxy.

Vodou Footprints: Levoy Exil – Saint Soleil’s Vodou Mystic

_N9A3774

Levoy Exil is an artist. He’s from Haiti. He lives in Haiti. He is a visionary with deep roots into the mysticism of Haitian vodou. “I have revelations when I’m asleep. In black and white. The black is the body, the white is the spirit. I sing the song of creation to Damballah. I offer him blue, white and mauve. There are lines of dots all around the shapes, in relief. There are dots of light. The red is part of the body. It’s also a symbol of goodness, and it’s good for healing too. Damballah is a snake, made up of all colors.”

Levoy is an original member of the famous Haitian artistic movement called Saint Soleil, which began in 1972. Inspired by vodou religion and the cosmological energies called loa, or vodou spirits, St Soleil (Holy Sun) grew from the peasant mountainsides outside of Port-au-Prince into an internationally-renowned style specific to the culture of Haiti. Levoy still practices the art of the movement, and today is an icon of Haitian creativity and vodou symbology, helping bring to light the true beauty of this ancient belief system.

_N9A3758

_N9A3771

_N9A3741

logo_blackTrajan

Vodou Footprints: André Eugène – Atis Rezistans of Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Day1_PAP_Eugene17

Portrait of sculpture artist André Eugène, founder of Atis Rezistans on Grand Rue in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Day1_PAP_Eugene5

Day1_PAP_Eugene4

Day1_PAP_Eugene3

Day1_PAP_Eugene

All of his skulls in his work are real human skulls. We asked him how he was able to get a hold of them and he said, “Many things are easy to come by in Haiti. All my work is recycled. You ask for a human skull, you can easily get one.”

Day1_PAP_Eugene6

Day1_PAP_Eugene18

Day1_PAP_Eugene11

Day1_PAP_Eugene9

Day1_PAP_Eugene8

Day1_PAP_Eugene10

Day1_PAP_Eugene14

Day1_PAP_Eugene15

Day1_PAP_Eugene16

logo_blackTrajan

New Print: La Push It – 2007 (Limited 10 editions)

21H x 31W giclee print on Moab 300gsm Entrada Rag. Limited 10 Editions prepared with cream matt on silver aluminum frame behind museum glass. Total dimensions approximately 30H x 39W (10 editions remaining).

21H x 31W giclee print on Moab 300gsm Entrada Rag. Limited 10 Editions prepared with cream matt on silver aluminum frame behind museum glass. Total dimensions approximately 30H x 39W (9 editions remaining).

New print from the archives. A shot from La Push, WA in 2007. Due to winter storms, this beach changes dramatically each season, from new logs and old growth tree stumps so shifting rock banks and fresh water pools.

Matted and framed behind a silver brushed aluminum frame and museum glass for $1,050.00

Photography: Color and Digital on Aluminium, Glass and Paper.

Size: 21 H x 31 W x 0.1 in

Keywords: beach, photography, fine art, washington state, color, Pacfic Northwest, landscape

Mexico: The Land of the Craft

2015_Mazatlan-2029

Mexico is a land of southern sun, warm sands, dusty cobbled streets filled with wafting scents of freshly grilled meats, buttery shrimp skewers and braying donkeys laying idle under the shades of ruffled palm fronds. It is a humble mix of ocean beaches to classic hacienda-style farmland below centuries-old ranches to the hurrying belches of city horns and graffitied buses intermixed within a colored historic city center. The people of Mexico know very well how to eat like ruling kings and drink like maddening queens. They choose their ingredients from the busy market stalls where meats and seafoods, produce and local spices and herbs carry lines of shoppers out to the homegrown rows of agave that stretch along arid rolling landscapes into the wild brushes of the traditional vaquero. Their culture very much resembles a barter and trade system of long ago, with real crafts-people, who to this very day continue to subsist on a technique passed down from generations.

There is pride in the people, the ones who truly know how to carve a cow into the choicest of meats, to the repairman that returns the hurricane-battered palapa back into that exotic specimen above brown leathery Texans and Californians. South of the border is where the Americas’ craftsmanship dwells, behind the colonial walls and feathered into the waves left by the dawn-patrolling ponga. What is in Mexico is from Mexico, built by the people.

2015_Mazatlan-1152015_Mazatlan-1282015_Mazatlan-6932015_Mazatlan-6252015_Mazatlan-10482015_Mazatlan-10572015_Mazatlan-10522015_Mazatlan-6852015_Mazatlan-13912015_Mazatlan-14382015_Mazatlan-14402015_Mazatlan-14982015_Mazatlan-15112015_Mazatlan-20242015_Mazatlan-20422015_Mazatlan-24412015_Mazatlan-24292015_Mazatlan-2461

logo_blackTrajan

Photo of the Day: Athena Devouring Her Soldiers

CameronKarsten2013_Goya

Inspired by Francisco Goya’s 1819-1823 oil painting Saturn Devouring His Son, the above project speaks of humanity’s innate compulsion to send its soldiers into the throes of death.  We fight for land.  We fight for possession and power.  It is our willingness to send man and woman into war; and Athena above, goddess of warfare (and wisdom) unleashes her rage over the very men and women we as a people send into battle.

On the other side of the coin, we also fight for freedom, for a voice, for the ability to live our lives as we choose.  There are always two sides, our decisions coming from a place we find within ourselves.

Shot with three Q-flashes, black back drop, and a 6-stop neutral density filter allowing me to shoot wide open, I brought the subject as close to the wide angle lens as possible to create distortion in her face and hands.  Goya’s image is offered below for reference.

Location: private residence

Camera/Lens Specifics: Canon 5D Mark III with Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM Lens

16mm, 1/80 sec at ƒ/2.8, ISO 100, tripod.

Post: LR4 & Adobe PS6

Cameron Karsten Photography

Screen Shot 2013-03-11 at 1.23.58 PMFrancisco Goya (1819-1823 oil painting) Saturn Devouring His Son

Woodblock Seasons, Sweet Gum Prints

Woodblock printing is either a small-scale process or a large-range endeavor. Contributor Cameron Karsten explores the process and the result through artist Tracy Lang’s eye for detail and love of the end result.

via Woodblock Seasons, Sweet Gum Prints.

Photo Essay: The Woodcut Art of Tracy Lang