When I consider making a new portrait, my thoughts usually begin with the environment the subject is within. When the environment has fundamental historical significance, the experience becomes really special… and when it is part of the ancient network of ancestral Pueblo peoples [Anasazi] who incorporated carved dwellings in volcanic cliffs as part of their…
As some of you may have surmised, watery environments are some of my favorite “land”scapes. And part of my endeavor as a photographer is probing the definition of landscape and the nature of place as an ongoing foundation of my work. It’s what most good photographers like doing: recasting the character of places with a…
![Assignment: Asbury Park, NJ [updated]](https://blog.michaelmatsil.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/LS072511_0780.jpg)
A visit last year to the famed Asbury Park, NJ… the “jewel” of the Jersey Shore… Updates to an earlier post. An honest expose of what I saw and who I met….
This is the third installment on this blog of what is in danger of becoming a series, or dare I say a “project”. Living in proximity to awesome amounts of nature can do that to you. Parts 1 & 2 examined scale and spatial sensation. In part 3, I explore density in terms of the patterns,…
I’ve always considered thoughtfully designed furniture as the smallest scale of architectural expression. If you think about it, it has everything that any building or interior has; concept, material, method, structure, program. And…. the really good stuff, knits it all together to fully realize Vitruvius’s concept of “firmness, commodity and delight” in architecture. And speaking of the…
Recently I did a couple of sessions for my friends at my Yoga alma-mater, Yoga District, in Washington, DC. No dramatic and Gumby-esque poses here. Just a couple of my favorite teachers in the studio, and in repose. As an environmental portrait photographer… that’s just the way I like it: the integrity of the simple…
As noted in an earlier post, I love being on ships. Mind you, I wouldn’t call myself a sailor, navigator or yachtsman. The kind of ships I like are the kind where you call yourself a passenger and put on black tie for cocktails and dinner. I’ve taken a couple of ‘laps’ around the Caribbean,…
There are many places in this world that claim the title of “big sky country”, but to me the biggest of the big skies is out on the open sea. This is where we can observe the ever changing atmosphere with no visual interruption and no filters. And to boot, it neatly meets the ocean…
One of the joys of living in my new home in Santa Fe, NM is being able to walk out of my house and walk right into the Santa Fe National Forest and the Sangre de Cristo mountains. I grew up hiking and climbing in the furry forests of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New…
Much of my history as a landscape photographer has been about the landscape and its relationship with some physical evidence of human activity and settlement. All in the pursuit of ‘defining’ the idea of landscape in a specific time and point of view. Recently, on a trip to northern California, I found myself taking a…
“There is no closed figure in nature… Every shape participates with another…. and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.”
Though now mostly a portrait and landscape photographer, I still regularly get calls, and am called back to my early commercial photography days when I had something of a specialty in architectural and interior photography in the Washington, D.C. area. In the 90’s, I was first assistant to the great architectural shooter Maxwell Mackenzie, from…
Who am I? A good question to ask yourself every now and again, and especially germane at the beginning of a new year and the launching of a new blog that I’m really excited about. This will be an opportunity for me to share new work, beginnings, interesting visual discoveries, thoughts, words, travels and anything…