Avoiding Burnout with Large Format Photography

When I was working full-time as a photojournalist, my life was very busy with daily assignments. With 700 photo assignments a year, burnout is inevitable. I love photography, but the daily grind becomes tiresome. To combat burnout, I turned to large-format landscape photography.

My exploration into photography got serious with my amazing photography professor Allen Dutton at Phoenix Community College. He was a well-known professor and a large-format photographer himself. He would have his friends, master photographers, send him print portfolios to show to his students. It was a wonderful experience to see these original works. Two years later, I was a senior studding journalism at Northern Arizona University when an exhibition of 20X24 inch prints by Ansel Adams was on display. The photographs were spectacular—beautifully printed images that left a lifelong impression on me.

At the time, I was using a 35mm camera, but I dreamed of owning an 8×10 camera and hoped someday I would create work like his. Seventeen years later, I sold old camera equipment, bartered, and made payments on a Deardorff 8×10 camera. I believe it was 1990, and that was the beginning of my large-format landscape work.

To combat the burnout from the newspaper work, I would drive through the Arizona desert, forests, and abandoned structures, creating 8×10 large-format photographs. This endeavor continues today and has lasted over 30 years. I hope to share these photographs with you as this blog progresses.