Owen Dudley Skiing Out of Darkness Mount Baker Washington © Jay Goodrich

I stood there looking at myself in the mirror. The scene unfolding was reminiscent of a Hunter S. Thompson novel. Gritty face. Bloodshot eyes. A general foggy demeanor spiraling around my hungover head. The girl that was to become my wife was lying naked in the bed behind me. It was my first commercial photo shoot, there is absolutely no reason that I should be feeling this way. I grabbed for the Advil, Alka-seltzer, and water, need water. My tongue felt like I was a cat preparing to cough up a hairball. It is safe to say there were sweaters covering my teeth. I heard the music of last night’s party still ringing in my ears. I vaguely remember some nakedness to the point of mild porn in the gondola last night with hand-held flash going off as random as a dance strobe in a techno bar, but the fog was doing its best to hide any and all of those embarrassments. Did I really take it this far? I mean, I got paid to do this to myself. This was only a wedding for god’s sake. Was this going to be the rest of my life and career?

Almost two decades later, I was in the same place. A mirror, in a bathroom, with sweaters on my teeth. In Vancouver this time, not Vail. Yes, I was shooting an assignment. This time about the Olympics and ski dirtbags. It’s good to see that many things have changed and many things have not. I am married with two kids now. My wife told me to go and have fun. This wasn’t feeling much like fun. The dirtbags woke me up off of my couch at about 2am as the whole party went nuclear. Much like the light porn I still vaguely remember from the wedding in Vail so long ago, it began with a concept, a contract, and unlimited handshaking, touring, and of course skiing. I only remember my friends prying my eyes open and asking if I was awake. The smell of spilled red wine, tequila, and beer permeated the condo. We were supposed to ski today and the snow was falling out of the sky like never before on this journey. Very similar to the brain cells that were littering the floor before me.

My life consists of writing, photographing, and family. Sometimes there is a little sleep thrown in there, but most times not. I pushed for this career, I dreamt of it, I wished for it, and there are many times that the dream of frolicking through the wild flowers without a care in the world turns into the Freddy Kruger of nightmares. Like I have always said and probably always will, lob the grenade into the room first, then head in, resurrect the broken and busted survivors to do it again on another day. Would I change my life? Sometimes there are parts that I would. Spending more time with my family so they don’t hate me so much, and trying to be a better man, I seem to be caught in the phase of always trying. I am standing on the precipice of 15 years as a professional photographer and writer and I am only truly scratching the surface of that lifestyle and occupation.

Many ask me how I do it? They want the remedy to fix their dreams, hopes, and career paths. My advice is always-Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you cannot do something. Envision it and go after full-tilt, like you were running from that brown bear and your life depended on it. The results will be shocking, almost to the point of perfection, if you stay away from the psychotic episodes. I have brought my entire personal life to my career and vice versa. I live the dream and the nightmare, every day. It is safe to say that tomorrow I will drop another monster backcountry line full of cold smoke powder and on Sunday will be shooting another hotel for Hilton. It’s all about living in balance with the world, nature, family, and concepts. Some days it’s as perfect as three feet of consolidated, bonded, trackless powder and other times that it is as rotten as a freezing trend after ten inches of rain. It is safe to say that tomorrow, I will fix the hand grenades of today and the cycle will continue. Inevitably.

Burned Koa Trees on Mauna Kea Hawaii © Jay Goodrich

There are millions of fetishes out there. Sexual. Professional. Libational. Nutritional. We humans all have our weaknesses. Hell, I even heard of woman who is obsessed with drinking gasoline. Gasoline? Every day is a learning experience I guess. My first encounter with a tree was when I was about five. We had this slanted maple in the front yard of my parents house that just begged to be climbed. It was an early spring day at age five that I climbed that sucker for the first time. I remember it so vividly, blue hooded sweatshirt, jeans, white Nikes with a red stripe. I remember the knees scraping along the bark as I squatted my way up that thing. Lime green budding leaves of spring. Blue skies with high puffy clouds. A brisk breeze in the air. Maybe my obsession started there? Are there any kids that don’t love to climb trees? I think it is a right of passage. Those trees got bigger and bigger as we got older and evolved into other trials. I went to bikes, then to skis, then to rock, and then full circle again.

Deep Snow at Mount Baker Ski Area © Jay Goodrich

For the last twenty years of my life, one of my main obsessions has been photography. I have lived it, breathed it, fretted over it, cried over it, and fought it exclusively every day. I can tell you that if you can visualize it, visualize anything, you can make it happen. Think about the placebo. P.O.S. The power of suggestion. Maybe that is where our fetishes come from, a place we cannot stop turning deep in the folds of our gray matter. A reality we just need to taste. Day in and day out. “It’s like acid in your veins.” Maybe. Those freakin’ trees of my youth have become somewhat of a fetish of my adulthood. If I have a camera anywhere near me, I am going to shoot the shit out some poor tree somewhere in the world. I spent days working trees in China, an afternoon in a backyard quiver in Hawaii, weeks of bristlecones and pinyons in Colorado, and now the firs and maples of the Pacific Northwest. I can smell those twisted and gnarled formations of Big Sur the second I exit the plane in San Fran-like a bloodhound on an escaped con.

Foggy Winter Forest Washington © Jay Goodrich

It is safe to say that trees do it for me. I am a whore for them. What is it? Their lines. Shapes. Trees are sexy. You can spend hours on just one seeking a literal composition or breaking it down to the most abstract of forms. Broken lines, smooth lines, crooked lines, disrupted lines, burnt lines, dead lines, living lines, limitless. I can’t stop nor would I ever want too. Maybe some day, somewhere I will be able to put them to rest, but for now the obsession continues. I can’t wait to see what I will find out there in the forest tomorrow, or the next day, week or month. I know they will be there sitting waiting for me to train my eye on them, not with hatchet or saw, but with a black box full of technology. My friends are now getting into it too. Whenever we are out shooting they point out what they think might make a good composition and inevitably they are fueling the fire. A bonfire now with gallons of gasoline thrown on it.

Cactus and Pinyon Single Track Mountain Biking © Jay Goodrich

In a way maybe the need for those trees is my way of exploring a little environmentalism? They do create the oxygen we need to breathe and they need our CO2. We are destroying them by ten-fold on a minute by minute basis. And in turn we will probably destroy ourselves. Plant the trees. Save the trees. If for no one else then a self-proclaimed professional photographer, writer and tree whore. Ok. I need to go have a cigarette. I hope that was as good for you as it was for me. If you need to find me, I have a date with some wood, out in the woods.

Koa Tree Wind Hawaii Volcano © Jay Goodrich

The Original RAW Without Adjustment © Jay Goodrich

If you ask my wife, she will tell you that I am the moodiest person on the planet-ridiculously happy one minute and ready to end it all at a moment’s notice the next. Those mood changes surprisingly change my creative disposition, and not only the way I take photographs, but the way that I process them too. You can create mood in the field during different weather conditions or you can create different moods when processing your images after the fact. How do we go about this?

Shooting in the field is definitely the hardest of all the scenarios to generate mood because you are controlled exclusively by your environment. If you head out to photograph on a clear, cloudless day, the mood of your photographs will differ drastically from a day when you head out and everything is enshrouded in fog, or it’s raining, or snowing, or even clearing as the sun is setting. All these scenarios give your photographs very distinct and different moods. At the same time, you can change that mood while processing them too. Now generating a mood within your frame, can truly be limitless.

Think about the direction of processing your image. You can process an image darker to promote a more thought provoking view or lighter to cheer up your viewers emotions. The same holds true when adding color. Blues are cooler, thus driving a more inward feeling, while warm tones can promote a positive mood. You can add grain to add confusion. Add sharpness to add clarity. Blur parts of your image to change your viewers focus. And in the same thought you can combine of any of the previous mentioned techniques as well.

My photographic mission has been changing pretty rapidly lately and now Adobe’s Lightroom software is more of the mainstay image adjustment tool than Photoshop. This is happening because of two reasons. One, most of the editors that I am currently working with will not even accept a file out of Photoshop. It must be a RAW converted to a DNG. Lightroom allows me to make image adjustments and still export a DNG that looks the way I intended, but also allows my editors to see the original file for verification of its validity. Interpretation–NO MERGED IMAGES ALLOWED! And two, I don’t have a ton of time, so if I can create it in camera and then process it quickly, I then can move on to the next project.

Mastered RAW Completed in Lightroom with Dark Mood © Jay Goodrich

For those of you that aren’t in the mood to give it a try maybe the included image will get you there.

Owen Dudley going Holga in Washington © Jay Goodrich

Have you ever heard of a Holga? Or Lomography? The Holga might go down in history as the biggest piece of shit plastic camera ever produced. And it was made in and for the country who is notorious for producing cheap crap replicas of reality–China. At the same time though, they produce pure perfection like the Mac Book Air I am typing this post on. Lomography grew out of a similar trend. This time with a piece of crap Russian camera. Both of these tools had a lot of things in common, mainly their light leaks and cheap fabrication, and it was primarily these two features that surprisingly allowed them to grow a cultish following among photographers. If you knew your camera leaked light along the top horizontal edge, you could effectively compose for it and use its disadvantages to your creative advantage. Much like Guerrilla Warfare.

I can already feel my purist colleagues rolling in their proverbially graves. What no multiple exposure merging? Disregarding image perfection. It is necessary to make sure that you eliminate the shadows and find detail in every part of the landscape. Your thought process is ludicrous Jay. You have fallen off your rocker. Maybe sippin’ a little too much of the Old Lady’s moon shine again are we? Maybe. But I am changing, not into a butterfly, I am developing my mission and viewpoint as an artist. And as this occurs, my likes and dislikes are changing as well. The world is far from perfect and I am beginning to believe that photography shouldn’t be perfect either.

Photography is becoming extremely sterile. And in that pursuit, so is the creativity, so is the style, and so are the images. I am seeing so many photographs of popular places in different light (albeit amazing light) with different compositions, but these images now possess almost nothing of interest to me. Is it because my growth as a photographer is turning me into a snob? I don’t think so. Is it because I am tired of looking at the places I have seen so many times prior. Probably not. I think it is because those images are becoming so typical in their style that they are benign. Lustless. Clean. I want True Grit or at least a grit that fits the subject.

I think this quest for perfection became a most sought after ideal as the film industry began to give way to the digital era. Companies like Fuji had films like Velvia with its ridiculously fine grain structure. They worked this engineering so hard because publishing techniques and secondary separations tended to blur/muddy the final outcome at that stage of the technology game. That mission of smoothing out film continued with noise in the digital sensor. Nikon has managed to surpass their heralded D3s with their forthcoming D4 in noise suppression. Now every image will be perfect and to the entering amateur that may in fact continue the sterilization process to the point of a photography demise in my opinion. There are times I want that noiseless perfection, knowing full well that I can junk it up if I so choose. So even at a time when photography is becoming sterile, I want a camera that can produce sterile as long as I can create T-Max 3200 with light leaks in the end.

Maybe you are striving for that image perfection like many others. Perfect light shining across some vast expanse as the sun kisses the horizon in an f22 starburst with just the right amount of pink clouds in the upper third of your composition. Ah yes. The perfect checklist of capturing one-stop exposures for your ability to join everything together in a two-hour Photoshop session. I know, I have been there, and sometimes still go there, although not that often anymore. I want grain. Simplified color. Or no color at all. Strong lines and textures. What I often thought I wanted was Jackson Pollock. Now I want Jay Goodrich–a recognizable situation, with abstraction mixed in to the point that you almost fall off of my view point, but somehow manage to stay connected as you see that point get driven right through the head of my subject like a vampire stake. I am going to take your checklist, crumple it up, and light it on fire. Why? Because I can. Now all you have to do is leave the cattle behind and come join me on the razors edge. I will have a mason jar full of black cherry moonshine waiting for you when you do.

Snowy Owl Stare © Jay Goodrich

Heather told me I was crazy. No one was going to be able to guess the location from this last post. Yet the first comment from Robert Levy was pretty close. Then comment after comment got closer and closer. I was in fact in Canada, and in Vancouver earlier that day, but when the image of Jade and I was taken we were in the wetlands of Boundary Bay photographing snowy owls with our friend Art Wolfe. Jade was playing her usual hard to get, but amazingly she managed to sit next to me for close to an hour. Not bad for a six year old. I guess a weird looking white bird that can spin its head around three hundred and sixty degrees can grab the attention of even Princessa.

Barred Owl Napping © Jay Goodrich

Last Monday began in Vancouver, migrated to the Arc’teryx outlet store, then went to the Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary where we discovered and photographed a barred owl, and finally finished in the marshes of Boundary Bay photographing snowy owls. Not too bad for a single day across the border. Jade has now traveled out of the United States over five times. Here first trip was when she was 11 months old and discovered that sand on the Caribbean in Mexico was not to be touched by bare feet.

Oh, and the winner…David Clumpner was the first person to successfully guess Boundary Bay. David, if you want to pick an image from our stock site or portfolio site, email that selection with your shipping address to me, we will get a 16 x 24 print out to you in the coming weeks. Thank you to everyone who commented. We will be thinking of additional ways to give more stuff away in the very near future.

On Monday friend and fellow photographer Yuri Choufour snapped this image of my daughter Jade and me. If you guess where we were and what we were photographing, you will get a print of the subject. Answer coming next week.

Owen Dudley Becomes Air in the Mist © Jay Goodrich

Or is the journey an adventure? I think the two are so interconnected and interrelated that you cannot have one without the other. I have been living an adventure for a very long time now and it is has definitely been a journey. An experience. Life like in all respects. There are those sayings–Life is like a journey…With age comes wisdom…etc. Full of twists, turns, ascents, and descents.

The whole concept of adventure and journey can fit into any aspect of life. Or life itself. Think about it. Creativity. Those who seek it regularly, discover it is full of twists, turns, peaks, and valleys. Life is the same way. Growing older. Peaks, valleys, twists and turns. Exploration. Peaks, valleys, twists and turns. All of it, every complete part of it is connected to the ideals. It doesn’t matter where, when, or how you are at any given point in your personal life, professional life, or creative life. You will encounter journey and adventure and life. Symbiosis. Very much like the relationship of aperture, shutter speed and iso.

The key to your success in any aspect of whatever is very simple and very hard. Recognize how to rise from the valley. How to prolong the peaks. To lean into the turns. And continuously grow and progress. The reason it is difficult is because the clues along the way may not be placed right out in front of you. Hence the reason the journey is an adventure and the adventure is a journey and it all corresponds to just about every scenario you can place in front of it.

To abstract? Maybe. Or maybe not? You be the judge. Think about it and think about every experience you have had to this date. Were the mistakes you made avoidable? If only one decision went a different way would have the whole thing turned out differently? Better or worse. With age comes wisdom, but does wisdom come if you are not open to experiencing all that life throws at you? If you don’t ride the mistakes and climb to the peaks, where will you be? And is the valley necessarily a bad place? Think about Picasso’s Blue Period. If you sit on the couch watching tv will you be a better person than if you make a mistake in the mountains and a death in your party results from it? All possibilities based on action and reaction.

I am hoping that this post forces you to think about your life. Your journeys and adventures. It may pose more questions than answers, but it is those questions that may have you realizing that at 2:01PM you have the ability to turn every adventure and every journey right around from whatever it isn’t to whatever it should be. The same holds true at 2:02PM, 2:03PM, and 2:04PM. Now stop reading.

Suset over the Lava Beds Processed in Lightroom 4 Only © Jay Goodrich CLICK TO ENLARGE

Earlier this week Adobe Labs released the first Beta version of Lightroom 4. I am a huge user of Lightroom so I immediately downloaded this new version to have a look at what I can be expecting. I have to tell you that I was pleasantly surprised.

As soon as you open the software up you notice the workspace has changed. There are two new editing modules on the right–Map and Book. You can now tag all of your images on a map brought to you by Google Earth. This also includes the ability to locate your spots via GPS longitude and latitude functions. You can tag whole libraries or just a single image at a time. Very cool. Also included is the ability to create books for publication. Lightroom is offering press printed books through Blurb with all of Blurb’s Proline features, but if want to use someone else, you can layout your entire book and then export it as a PDF. Again, really no limitation.

I was hoping for more video capabilities and it looks like that is on the very near horizon.  The best part about storing your video in the Lightroom 4 Library will be the fact that you won’t need to view the clips in an external editor such as Quicktime. Adobe also added the ability to edit your clips’ in and out points which will really speed up the organization process for film you are planning on editing. If you have multiple clips that you want to use on a single take, you can actually create a virtual copy of the film and change the in and out points correspondingly. Magic. You now have the ability to make adjustments to the clips via the Quick Develop settings and even attach Develop Module presets to them. Not all of the presets work, but most do.

The Develop Module has also gone through some tweeking. Under the Brush and Graduated Tools you now have the ability to locally adjust white balance, noise, and moire. The Auto Mask check box actually works amazingly well now too! Adobe also updated the global adjustments. Exposure and Contrast are together and Recovery and Fill Light are gone. Don’t worry though, Adobe is now giving us Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks adjusting sliders. The whole process makes much more sense to me. In addition, we now have a 2012 process under Camera Calibration and it seems to be a bit more forceful with its adjustments to the images. Some may not like it, but I do.

Other note worthy additions include the ability to export videos directly to social media pages and the ability to generate a soft proof image for printing on a specific paper and color profile. This is great addition because now you will be able to create a virtual copy of your image with the soft proofing turned on, match it to your original, and you are off to the races. Like I said I am on board with this update. Of course this is a Beta and if I could have my way with Adobe there are some things that I really want.

Give me Content Aware Fill! The best Photoshop add ever in my opinion. Give it to me in Lightroom. I don’t care if directly adjusts pixels and that is not the way Lightroom works. You are Adobe, just do it. I want the ability to adjust the masks that I make with the Brush tool and Graduated Tool. Especially when it comes to Shifting and Feathering my Mask Edges after the fact. Maybe a little Smart Radius too? How about the ability to merge multiple exposures? Curve presets for the Tone Curve Tool. And the ability to locally edit video–adding text, titles, vignettes, and turning the captured sound off or on. Now we are talking. I would also like the ability to export my movie clips directly into Premiere Pro just like I can export my stills to Photoshop. And have the adjusted clip stack directly back in my Library with the original? That’s all, it’s not a huge list. Let’s see what March Brings.

Owen Dudley Drops into the Baker Backcountry © Jay Goodrich

Well, finally, it snowed. It has literally been since November, but on the final day of the year, Mount Baker got hit with a foot of new snow. Owen Dudley, Tyler Hatcher and myself headed out to see what we could make of a perfect stormy day. You can view more of the images on the Mount Baker Ski Area website. Now, we just need this to continue so we can do it again, and again, and again–much like the movie Groundhog Day. I guess if you love it, repeating it is not really a torture. Happy New Year!

The Vomit Comet in Fall Splendor © Jay Goodrich

Reset the clock to fifteen years ago. I was upwardly mobile in the architecture and construction industry. I had money. I had toys, many toys. And I was in the process of purchasing a racing machine. The goal was one of the simplest ideas and yet one of the most difficult to complete. Create the lightest mountain bike possible with the least amount of money expended and make damn sure it had class, style, and a bit of flair that would have other riders asking themselves, “What the fuck was that?” The project came together with an overwhelming success. I purchased a hand made, custom sized frame from Independent Fabrication. This was an employee-owned, start-up company in Somerville, Mass. A company full of bike builders that were left high and dry by their now estranged boss Chris Chance, who was the founder of another bike company that went by the name of Fat City Cycles.

The frame was steel and tipped the scales at less than four pounds. The completed bike only weighed 21 pounds. It rode like the wind. And was my favorite bike to date. I raced it, road it, and cared for it like it was one of my first children. It was a relationship of obsession. It made it through three 24 Hours of Moab races before it succumb to complete and total devastation. In the bike’s defense, the final Moab race was like none other. It was a Mother Nature experiment gone wrong, really wrong. The desert was angry that day my friends like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli. The skies dumped ten inches of rain in what seemed like minutes. It turned the microscopic sandstone dust particles into a brake, bearing, and bicycle destroyer. You could literally swim to the finish line after the final turn in the race course. My wonderful machine lost its life that day. Frozen, rusted, and abused beyond repair. Well, almost, another plan came together.

A year later the IF was resurrected. New paint, and a new purpose in life. A self-imposed torture machine. You see, instead of returning her into the lightweight 24 speed racer that she was, I opted to convert her into the power of one. A single speed mountain bike. And now she was even lighter, stronger, and faster than before. Now if you have ever tried to ride a single speed mountain bike, you will know that it isn’t the initial experience leaves you asking for a…better one. Actually it is torture. You ride and ride hard. My resurrected steed quickly got the name of “The Vomit Comet”. There were very few rides during its initial season that didn’t contain a vomit session from yours truly. This actually went on for a few years. Eventually I got stronger and stronger and learned how to ride some of the hardest rides in the Vail Valley with only one speed.

I quickly began educating myself on how not only to ride a single speed, but how to cheat with it as well. See, you may be limited during your ride, but the key was always figuring out what gearing you needed before getting out on that trail. You didn’t want to walk, but you didn’t want to scorch up the steepest sections with ease either. It was the ultimate balancing act. Then one day during a typical two hour ride, the sound of inevitability chimed. I over-torked my rear wheel, put a huge flat spot in it, partially because of a bad wheel build, (not by me) bringing the trusty machine to a halt. Major surgery was the only way to fix her. She was hung up for a while as I began adding miles to a brand new bike this one had many speeds and a lot of suspension. Then we moved from Colorado to Washington. And now we come to present day.

There she hung in the garage next to the other five bikes. Cob webs gathering. Covered in dirt from all over the country. Colorado. Utah. California. Two days ago the doctor (that’s me) decided to see what could be done. Surprisingly, with some spoke loosening, a bit of pushing, hammering, truing, ball scratching, lube, and some air she awoke like Frankenstein. Still with a minor limp, but one that could be worked with for now. “What is thy bidding my master?” “How ‘bout a ride?” Day two and counting. My body is completely sore and tortured, again. She is loving the Pacific Northwest. This bike was created by East Coast woods riders. It is nimble and accelerates like a top-fuel dragster. And yes, she still owns the name, “The Vomit Comet”. Yesterday was a homemade quesadilla, strawberries, and a handful of chocolate chips. Today was bow-tie pasta with mushroom marinara and some animal crackers.

The beauty of riding a machine like this is that it makes me feel, other than sick, like my favorite t-shirt from Patagonia–Live Simply. No shifting. Brakes that barely work. Top fuel acceleration. And precision handling for the woods of the Northwest. Living Simply and loving it! I was going to have eggs for breakfast tomorrow, but figured that wasn’t the smartest idea. Day three is about to happen.