Shooting photos outside my comfort zone

in and around Quito (slightly NSFW)

My brother and his wife have been in Ecuador for the past five months, staying just outside Quito. As their time there wound down, they put out last call offers to come visit. I wouldn’t likely visit Quito otherwise, so heck yeah…

These first two photos are not what I typically shoot. Nature. Wide open spaces. Mountains and volcanoes. I thought that I shot a lot of different types or genres of photography, but this made me realize I’ve still left a lot unexplored.

I like how they turned out, finding my favorite street shooter, a Minolta TC-1 with its 28mm lens, not too wide for the already wide open spaces.

Coming back to the urban environment of Quito, I felt more at home, wandering the streets at night, getting lost as they climbed higher along the steep hillsides…

My brother and sister-in-law are birders, which is why I was tramping around 13,000 foot mountain ridges. That’s not something I’d normally do, but I’m glad I did.

All of us need to be open to doing and experiencing new things, we photographers no less so. Some of the new things I experienced that I owe to the practice of photography are here in this one little piece — corners of a city off the beaten path, brothels, and now mountains.

I need the excuse to shoot something in order to go see some place new (otherwise I could be shooting somewhere else). Whatever the vehicle is that gets you somewhere you wouldn’t otherwise have gone, ride it. An idiosyncratic obsession that leads you to try to track down an obscure idea that takes shape in a strange place? Perfect.