(upbeat music) - Photography for me has been not only my profession for the last 20 plus years, but it is my way of communicating with the world.

It's my way of sharing about things that I get to see, but it's also a way of creating images that are hopefully evocative for the viewer, but more importantly, it reflects what I'm trying to say.

(upbeat music) I opened Sweetlight Gallery in downtown Crookston about, it's coming up on seven years ago now.

This was my first foray into a gallery space.

I lived in the Twin Cities for 20 some years and I had a shop there for 17 years, but it was strictly a working space.

I've been doing art fairs that whole time.

So, when I moved up here about 10 years ago, this opportunity presented itself, I thought, "Wow, you have a storefront spot on downtown Crookston, sure, I'm gonna throw my hat in the ring and see what happens."

So, it's been fantastic so far.

I still end up doing far more art fairs than anything else.

It's not quite a big enough community to live entirely on just what happens here at the gallery.

(upbeat music) So right now in Sweetlight Gallery, I have kind of four major categories of work up right now.

I have landscape, kind of what would be termed traditional landscape location images.

I have a whole series of images, kind of called found object images or exploratory architecture images.

Typically old buildings, cool, old, rusty, grubby things.

I have a whole body of work that's abstract images, so, long exposures of water, ice formations that are tiny, tiny, but when you make a big print out of it, it almost becomes unrecognizable as what it is.

And then my most recent body of work is the botanical images.

I kinda stumbled on this by mistake up here in the Red River Valley.

I'm not originally from up here, so it took some time to kind of see and appreciate the beauty that is the prairie.

So when I would be out hiking in the wintertime, either snowshoeing or cross-country skiing, I was just noticing all of the plants and the unbelievable amount of detail and structure and the way it was just whimsical, the way they moved, the leaves.

And I collected a few of 'em, brought 'em back to my gallery, and I put 'em in front of my camera.

And I was just noticing how unbelievably captivating all of the movement was in these tiny, tiny little things that are, you know, the size of a dime or smaller in a lot of cases.

That has just kinda lit a fire inside of me.

It has me.

It's grabbed me and it has me.

(camera shutter clicks) So the technique that I have adopted for the prairie plants, and this will be a little bit techy, but I'm using focus stacking.

So I start at the closest thing to me, I take a shot, and now I have this little eight inch focusing rail that allows me to turn the dial and it moves the camera one millimeter per revolution.

And so, if I'm shooting a plant that's, you know, this much depth to it, I start here and I eventually take enough pictures where I have the entire thing in focus and then I use software to stitch those together or layer 'em together, and that's called focus stacking.

The ultimate cool thing about that is I have a hundred percent control about the depth of the field.

You see these two areas of sharpness here?

I like that and I like that part of the scene goes away.

It's really, really a gratifying process too.

And it is kind of software-driven and hardware-driven with the focusing rail.

But that focus stacking has allowed me to get image quality that I've just never been able to get before.

(upbeat music) I love finding just the amazing in the everyday scene.

That's really what I concentrate on.

So, when I go out to shoot landscape photos, I do not wanna shoot what everybody else is shooting.

There needs to be something to say with the image.

I don't necessarily just want pretty pictures, I want emotion, something that evokes a reaction in people.

I kinda naturally just push away from shooting the iconic.

I am kind of the anti-iconic shooter.

I want...

I wanna see the super cool in what's right at my feet.

I wanna see the super cool things that are in northwestern Minnesota.

(upbeat music) - [Voiceover] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008 and by the members of Prairie Public.