Brad Bullard

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I grew up exposed to photography. I remember both my grandfather and father shooting family photos with early Kodak box cameras and early Zeiss cameras complete with the flashbulbs that had to be licked before being inserted into the flash attachment. (And boy were they hot right after the exposure!) My earliest camera was a Kodak Instamatic. I remember the flash cube being a great innovation so that you could take 4 shots without changing bulbs.

My father got his first Nikon single lens reflex camera with interchangeable lenses in the mid 1960’s when I was around 10. It was through his experiences that I became more interested in photography. That was also the time period when I was introduced to names like Ansel Adams and Galen Rowell. As a family we spent summer vacations backpacking in the Sierra and Rocky mountains and the winters were spent skiing – both alpine and nordic – back in the days of leather lace-up ski boots. These activities were natural pathways into outdoor photography which is still my main interest.

I have enjoyed the switch from film to digital. I find the digital format is much more forgiving, in that you get immediate feedback and can adjust your parameters if the image is not what you imagined. For many years I relied on sort of a grab and shoot mentality of photography relying on the camera to get a good exposure. In the past decade or so my life pace has changed and I feel like I have more time to set up shots, and control and contemplate composition, and exposure. I am a novice in the post-capture computer editing world. I have used some rudimentary editing processes, but have barely scratched the surface of what the variety of software is capable of.

I now find that photography offers a more contemplative way to look at the world and an avenue to seek beauty in even the most mundane subjects and situations. There is a challenge involved in the process of imagining an exposure, being in the right place at the right time to capture the image, and capturing the moment in a way that meets the imagination. This challenge is simultaneously exciting and relaxing, and it is what keeps me pursuing the next image.

I hope you enjoy these images and they give you some of the same pleasure that I experienced as they were created.