Beacon Hill

This past Sunday I walked up to Beacon Hill in Griffith Park, which is accessible from the Fern Canyon Trailhead. It's not a challenging hike but there is a steady incline throughout. My main reason for being out this weekend was to photograph the plant life along the trail and to get a few photos of the L.A. River in context with the city.

I've been steadily incorporating more natural environments and urban nature into my portfolio for the past two years. The blurry space where nature intersects with our daily lives is an aspect of living in the city that I've become extremely interested in lately. It prompted me to invest in some macro equipment and start an Instagram profile called "The Small Outside" as a testing ground for this type of work. Although it may seem like a break from my usual urban landscape/street work, both are fueled by my desire to record our impact on the spaces we inhabit.

From a creative approach I've had to make a few adjustments to the way I work to make successful photographs of this subject matter. The biggest challenge was adjusting to macro photography. At first it was difficult to find interesting compositions in nature at such a small scale. It took a lot of trial and error before I was happy with the results that I was getting. A second challenge was to learn to convey the physical scale of the places I was photographing. Moving between macro and landscape work on the fly takes some getting used to but a balance between the two is emerging.