Greetings from Bosquecito, New Mexico!

[Deon Reynolds]

Before I was born, my father took photography/darkroom from Minor White (worth the look if you don't know who he was). When I was seven years old he handed those lessons down to me and turned me loose in his darkroom. I never stopped and neither has the magic. Other than my fathers tutoring (mostly about art and design) I have never taken a class in photography. Before college I assisted my father as he created seven “states” photographic coffee table books for Graphic Arts Center, loading film on fishing boats and sea planes in Alaska to horseback in Texas. After college I started out as a photographers assistant. I freelanced for several photographers, one did architectural photography doing work for Architectural Digest and Better Homes and Gardens, we would fly all over the country for this. Another photographer I worked for was a studio photographer, we mostly did catalog work for clients like Nordstrom, Nike, Adidas, etc. At this studio we mostly shot 4x5 and 8x10 film, it’s also where I was working when digital took hold in the commercial world and we started using a 4x5 digital scan back and Photoshop 5. Another photographer sent my wife and I off on location scouting adventures to places like the Chukchi Sea, Death Valley and obscure wilderness areas in the Cascade Mountains, we would pinch ourselves to see if we were dreaming… The paradigm shift that digital created changed commercial photography forever, then add in 9-11 which changed advertisers ways of spending forever, changing yet again the industry. So we sold our house near Portland, Oregon and moved to the small and very remote community of Eureka, Nevada to pursue photography as art. We spent 13 years documenting the historic legacy of mining, ranching and the empty landscape of the Great Basin Desert. We had been receiving death threats from the more conservative locals, so we put our 1880 bank building up for sale, when it sold we planed to wander the Southwest looking for the next place to call home. But, opportunities opened up and we took off on an adventure encircling North America twice with an orange cat named Rusty in a conversion van. We would spend 40 months, exactly 1,200 days living in a van, we would photograph utility grade wind farms and do casting and scouting for a Native American ad campaign for the US Census plus, I managed to create more images than I have ever created.

Just over a year ago we found paradise, a small solar home on acreage with a shop, studio, greenhouse and garden in Bosquecito, New Mexico. The studio is mostly functioning and the darkroom is waiting for a plumber to hook up the water and drain so I can get to work on the hundreds of rolls of film I shot while on the road. I had been processing my digital images along the way and even after ruthless editing still managed to create nine terabytes of images on the road. I figure I’m here in the studio and darkroom for some time as the mountain of photography I have created is very overwhelming!

I have way too many cameras, Trish likes to make fun of me for this… Digitally I’m using Canon 5dsr’s and Canon lenses: ts-e 17mm, ts-e 24mm mkII, ts-e 50mm macro, 85mm f=1.4 100m macro and a 200mm f=2.8 mkII.

With film I mostly use several modified Kodak “Fun Saver Panoramic 35” disposable cameras reloaded with Kodak Tri-X film. Next, a Hasselblad Flexbody and 501 c/m with 60mm CF, 100mm CF and 120mm Makro CF and a few Holga 120’s. And, I will not go into the boxes filled with a dozens of different kinds of plastic cameras...

Website: https://www.deonreynolds.com

Blog: https://deonreynoldsblog.com

[je ne regrette rien]

Very interesting story!